


even as a shadow, even as a dream

by theputterer



Category: Annihilation (2018 Garland), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Attempt at Humor, Author Pleads Creative License, Awkward Flirting, Blood and Violence, Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Creepy Critters, Dubious Science, Existentialism, F/M, Family Drama, Hopeful Ending, Horror, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Science Fiction, Self-Destruction, Somebod(ies), Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-04-26 21:20:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 46,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14410794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theputterer/pseuds/theputterer
Summary: After Galen Erso reveals he has built a new and annihilating weapon, a team is dispatched on an expedition to an island guarded by a force called the Shimmer, where the plans that might lead to the destruction of the weapon can be found.The team consists of six people: an FBI agent so by-the-book he's called robotic; a soldier in Army Intelligence carrying shadows and an ulterior motive; a blind linguistic anthropologist listening for a single voice; a paramedic haunted by trauma and addiction; a physicist turned whistleblower torn open with grief; and a biologist, the daughter of Erso, who thinks she is only here to save the world.The Shimmer takes them in.And everything they carry with them.What returns is not the same, if it returns at all.Or: an ANNIHILATION AU.





	1. Baltimore

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> story title from "Herakles" by Euripides, translated by Anne Carson, as published in "Grief Lessons: Four Plays."

 

* * *

 

_I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change._

\--Virginia Woolf, from _The Waves_

 

* * *

 

 

“Can you describe the tower?”

“No.”

She looks at her hands. Ten fingers. Ten nails. Good. That’s how many she’s supposed to have.

“What happened to Captain Andor?”

Brown eyes. Dark hair. A smile sharp enough to kill.

_Cassian?_

“I don’t know,” she whispers.

“Where is Bodhi Rook?”

Black hair. Shadowed eyes. Trembling hands.

_Bodhi!_

“Gone,” she says.

“What about Dr. Imwe? Or Sergeant Malbus?”

Sightless, pale blue eyes. Big, wary brown eyes. A walking stick crunching through the brush. An automatic rifle, swinging side to side, over a small river.

_Chirrut. Baze._

She swallows. “Dead.”

“Agent Tuesso? Is he dead too?”

Pale skin, dark eyes. Silence.

She shrugs, and turns away.

“Jyn?”

_Look up._

She looks up.

The woman in front of her, dressed head-to-toe in white, watches her with a gaze Jyn knows should be classified as _concerned,_ or even _fearful._ Beside her stands the soldier in worn fatigues, hair wispy, thin, and nearly gone entirely, eyes sharp with distrust and clear unease. He has a gun holstered at his hip, and she can see his fingers practically twitching, as if it is taking all his focus to not reach for it. To point it at her.

She feels suddenly cold, and looks down at her bare arms. A faded circle in black ink stares back at her from her left forearm. She covers it with her right hand.

The woman gives the softest of sighs.

“Jyn,” she says, and her voice is so soft, so calm.

So forgiving.

“Please. Tell us what you remember.”

Jyn closes her eyes.

 

* * *

 

**_Earlier_ **

“This is a cell.”

Jyn looks away from the screen for a moment, to survey her classroom. It’s her favorite type of class, in that it’s a seminar, meaning she only has about a dozen students as opposed to her massive Intro to Bio classes that pack lecture halls. Those classes are designed for non-Biology majors, populated by students only interested in earning that physical science general education credit, and while she does get some kids who end up switching majors into her department, the vast majority she only ever sees again from the other side of a crowded hallway.

But this class is her Introduction to Cell Biology class that is designed for Biology majors, designed for students on the pre-med track, designed for students with a passion for disease and cures and medicine and scientific advancement, and she loves it.

“Like all cells, it came from an existing cell,” she continues.

She’s quite sure they all know this already, but she has to cover the basics before moving on to more advanced theory and knowledge.

“One became two,” she says, as the black and white cell projected on the screen before the class does just that, dividing in a move that is not smooth, but close to it. “Two became four. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two. So on.”

Jyn forbids laptops in her classroom, and so the room is filled with the scratching of pencils and clicks of pens. It’s her favorite soundtrack.

“They structure every living thing,” she says, watching the cell divide and divide and divide. “Microbes. Flower petals. Octopuses. Bears. Humans. The structure of everything that lives, and everything that dies.”

A freshman reaches up to adjust her hijab. A sophomore shoves his glasses back over his nose.

“As students of medicine, the doctors of tomorrow,” Jyn continues, and she can practically feel the class swell up at her words, the hint of the future, their ambitions and dreams becoming manifest. “This is where you come in.”

As she speaks, she fiddles with the semi-translucent crystal at her throat. She only becomes aware of her fiddling when the student closest to her glances at her, distracted by the click of her nails against the stone. She swallows, smoothing it out on her sweater.

“The cell you’ve been looking at is from a tumor,” Jyn says, and a few of the students look up from their notes, studying the dividing cell on the screen with more interest. She wants to tell them there’s no point. The unnaturalness of the tumor is not obvious here.

It’s unnatural, but it also isn’t.

“Over the course of the coming term,” Jyn says, “We will be closely examining these cancer cells _in vitro,_ and observing autophagic activity.”

 

* * *

 

She splurges on a mocha after class, visiting the cafe closest to the classroom. A couple of her students had the same idea, and they all awkwardly acknowledge each other with a smile or a nod. None of them approach her to discuss the lecture material, and for that she’s grateful. She isn’t feeling too generous today. She suspects it has something to do with the fact that it’s day eight of overcast skies, this awful, ever-present gray that sucks all the energy out of her.

It isn’t fair. It’s the first week of September in Baltimore. This kind of weather should be outlawed.

The television set in a corner of the coffee shop is on, a CNN Breaking News chyron illuminating the screen: _EXPLOSION IN JEDHA._

Jyn frowns, steps a little closer, to read the closed captions that flicker across the screen.

_A massive explosion has rocked the city of NiJedha, the capital of Jedha, causing catastrophic damage and fatalities early estimates are placing in the thousands. Aid workers from neighboring Turkey are enroute to the country now. Jedha is an impoverished nation with a population of about 450,000 residents, and its capital city is locally referred to as the Holy City, causing speculation the explosion was a religiously motivated terrorist attack. No groups have claimed responsibility, and other details are still coming in. We will update you when we have more information._

Her mocha is set on the counter, recognizable by her vintage but still reusable Johns Hopkins thermos, and she steps forward to take it with another small smile and soft nod.

So it goes.

She leaves the cafe, headed to the parking lot, thinking fondly of the novel she started over the weekend and hasn’t yet finished, when she hears a voice call her name.

“Dr. Erso?”

Jyn turns on the spot, a surprised smile already unfurling over her face at the man approaching her.

“Dr. Erso?” She repeats, smirking. “A little formal, no?”

“Let me be proud of my protégée,” Saw Gerrera says, and she steps forward to hug him. Saw’s arms are big and warm, and he smells like sulfur, and she would normally find such a smell nauseating, but it’s _Saw_ and sulfur, and that is the smell of home.

They part.

“You’re growing out your hair,” Jyn notes, studying the off-kilter tuft of frizzy gray on Saw’s scalp. The last time she saw him, he’d been completely bald, and she’d made the assumption that he was losing his hair. This new evidence challenges that theory.

“My students already think of me as a mad scientist,” Saw says. “I thought I should epitomize the appearance of one.”

“You’re on the right track,” she says with a laugh. “What are you doing here? The semester at USC must have just started.”

“I’ve accepted a research position at Yale.”

Her eyebrows soar. _“Really?_ Going Ivy League? Wow, Saw, that’s great. Congratulations.”

Saw nods. “Yes. I thought it was time for a change. I’ve been at USC for… Well, since you were an undergrad, at least.”

She snorts, and Saw continues.

“The Los Angeles smog was beginning to get to my old lungs,” Saw continues, and she had thought his voice was a little hoarse. “Connecticut will be nicer, I think. Out of the desert, at least. I will still be teaching some Chemistry classes, of course. Can’t let my mad scientist look go to waste.”

“You just love terrorizing freshmen by making things explode in their faces.”

Saw’s grin is devious. “It enthralls some. You were one of them, Jyn.”

“I remember it well,” Jyn replies, returning his grin with one of her own.

Saw Gerrera’s Chemistry classes were legendary at USC. They were like her own Intro classes, except Saw put a heavier emphasis on the practical over the theoretical, setting off chemical reactions that were mostly safe, but definitely theatrical and dramatic. The university hemmed and hawed over it, but it was undeniable that his shenanigans brought additional prospective students into the science programs, many of them with wealthy parents interested in donating to their child’s department.

“I am headed up to New Haven to meet with the faculty,” Saw says. “But I thought I would swing by Hopkins to see how my best girl was doing.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” Jyn says. “I’ve got a couple small seminars this term, which is nice. Getting into cell biology, digging up archival footage of tumors at work. Fun stuff.”

Saw’s warm expression falls slightly. “And how are you doing outside of academia?”

“Like there’s such a thing,” Jyn says, but her joke falls flat. Saw’s expression turns more sympathetic. “Saw--”

“It has been ten years, Jyn.”

“I’m very aware,” she says, fighting to keep the agitation out of her voice.

“You know, I keep a picture of Galen and me in my office,” Saw says. “Occasionally, a doctoral candidate recognizes Galen on sight, asks if we’re still in touch. Your father’s work in the field of physics is still unparalleled, still studied, but it seems like very few are aware he has not been seen in public for a decade.”

Jyn shrugs. “That’s a long time to be gone.”

“Hm.” Saw surveys her. “Do any of your students ever ask? You share a surname.”

“No,” she says. “I’ve got undergrads, intro students. No one’s done the kind of research that would lead them to my fa--Galen’s, work.”

“Jyn--”

“Galen is dead, Saw,” Jyn snaps. “He hasn’t… Like you said. Ten years. No one has even heard a whisper from him. Not even his old research partner, and not… Not his daughter. He’s gone, and he isn’t coming back. And that’s… It’s probably for the best.”

Saw’s expression falls. “Jyn…”

“I have to go,” Jyn says, hurriedly. “It was great to see you, Saw. Let me know how Yale goes. Keep in touch.”

“Jyn--”

But she is already off, fighting the urge to run away, keeping her paces even, her crystal bouncing against her chest.

 

* * *

 

Ghosts line the walls of her house.

In one photo, Lyra Erso crouches in a dark cave, headlamp shoving her messy brown hair down in a way that will cause it to be disfigured for the rest of the day. In another photo, Galen Erso, in a white lab coat, stands next to Saw Gerrera, head shaved and beaming, their arms tossed around the other, a certificate from the NSF in Saw’s free hand. In another photo, six-year-old Jyn, hands at her waist, stands near pāhoehoe lava at the Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii.

Jyn does not make it a habit of lingering near the photos of the ghosts, but the appearance of Saw Gerrera has shaken her, and so she stands on bare feet, a glass of wine in hand, and looks at the walls of her house.

It was her parents’ house, actually, back from the days when Galen was working at the Pentagon and Lyra was a Bloomberg distinguished professor at Hopkins, and Jyn was a third grader at a local elementary school. Galen took the half-hour train ride to Washington every day, and Lyra would take Jyn to school, though she’d occasionally let her skip if Lyra was working on something she thought Jyn would find interesting, which was often. Jyn had loved living in Baltimore, and considers the years there to have been the happiest of her life. Her love for the city had surprised her, as she had not wanted to leave England, and was terrified of what the United States could be like, how it would be so different. But there was something about the city that sucked her in. Perhaps it was the seaport. Or the National Aquarium. Or the numerous historical monuments.

If she’s being honest, she knows it was how it held her family so closely together.

In Baltimore, the Ersos were a unit. They orbited around each other smoothly, their lives intersecting and refracting perfectly. Galen worked in his top-secret government lab, and Lyra and Jyn would take long weekends visiting him in Washington, with Lyra occasionally taking on a visiting professorship at Georgetown, and Jyn becoming obsessed with the International Spy Museum, dragging her parents there on nearly every trip. She remembers picnicking on the National Mall, watching the pandas in the National Zoo, and spending entire days in Smithsonian museums.

It all fell apart when Jyn was thirteen.

Galen and Lyra were in the Philippines, investigating a newly discovered cave of kyber crystals. Lyra and a couple colleagues were deep inside, noting the walls and the stones, and Galen was outside, working with a demolitions team, planning how to clear it out. The dynamite had already been set. They were supposed to be waiting for Galen’s call.

They were supposed to. Or they did.

An accident. A mistake.

A miscalculation, by Galen’s own hand.

The cave exploded.

Lyra’s body was returned to the States in pieces.

Jyn and Galen fell to their own pieces shortly after that.

She acted out; she got into fights at school, she cursed and cajoled and angered classmates and teachers. She shunned her studies. She rebelled. She was warped, in the loss of her mother, and she pushed her father as far away from her as she could.

She blamed him for the cave-in that had killed Lyra.

And he let her.

She decided to go away to a private girls school in California, on the other side of the country. She welcomed the move, eager to go to a sunny place, eager for the change. Her father slowly came to agree that it was for the best, that she would be well cared for, and receive a world class education.

He, meanwhile, would move permanently to Washington and throw himself into his secretive government work. She thought this to be for the best, too.

She thought she and Galen were too volatile to be so close. Without Lyra, without her comforting presence, her warmth and patience; it was only Jyn and Galen, and their quiet and their bitterness, and that was too much.

“Stardust,” he murmured to her, as the two of them stood at the security line at Dulles, and for the first time, her father’s nickname for her left her aching, not comforted. She was too hollowed out, by the loss of Lyra, the loss of Baltimore, the loss of it all. “My Stardust. Everything I do, I do to protect you. Do you understand?”

She didn’t meet his eyes, and she didn’t respond.

She went to California. She earned straight A’s at her school. She applied to the University of Southern California, and was accepted. Saw Gerrera sent her a long email, asking if she remembered him from the days he had worked with her father at the Pentagon, and of course she remembered Saw, Saw with his crooked smile, the airy laugh Lyra drew from him on a daily basis.

He invited her to lunch in his office on campus. He beamed when she told him she was at the university to study science.

“Physics, like your father?” he asked, and Jyn’s heart hurt, because she had not seen her father in years, he’d even missed her high school graduation. Saw recognized the pain in her face, and added, “Or applied geosciences, or speleology, like your mother? Or chemistry, like old Saw?”

That made her laugh. Saw always had a talent for that.

But she wasn’t interested in the study of energy and force, or the study of rocks and caves, or the study of elements and atoms. She was interested in natural science. In development and evolution.

In figuring out why good things fell apart. In figuring out why beings that inhabited parental roles abandoned their young. In figuring out how creatures developed without a familial structure for guidance.

She wanted to find an explanation, a revelation, for the Ersos. For what had happened, what she had done, what she had lost.

For why Galen no longer responded to her emails. For why she failed to call him. For why their schedules could so rarely align. For why the distance between them felt greater than Los Angeles and Washington, felt like the distance separating one end of the galaxy to another. For how it could feel so impossible to traverse.

In short: the study of life.

Biology.

She climbed the rungs of academia, earning the praise and admiration of professors and scientists. She got her doctorate, and dove into her postdoc work, looking at cell composition, researching the genetically programmed life cycles of cells, analyzing the structure of tumors, leading and curating studies on cancers.

To supplement her work, to give back, to pass on the mentorship and support she’d been given so generously her whole academic life, the kind of support she had never had from her absent father, she took up a teaching position at Johns Hopkins.

She was the spitting image of Lyra, and some of the faculty and administration remembered her.

Her resemblance to Lyra was something Galen had commented on, the last time they’d seen each other, ten years earlier.

She doesn’t want to think about that day.

It was the last time she saw her father.

She works and works, and tries to fill the hole in her heart left by her father’s abandonment. She drinks more wine than she should, to numb the ache, to hide her anger and regret and guilt and bitterness. She hides in her office, and watches the walls, as if she might only be waiting for her father to knock on the door.

She buries herself in research and studies, and hopes she can find the answers there. She tries to mimic the lives of solitary creatures, wonders if she can, one day, re-engineer herself into a being that does not need any family, that will one day wake up and not mourn loss.

Ten years later, she stands in her parents’ house, the Baltimore house, the house she and Galen fled after Lyra died, and she looks at the ghosts in the photos on the walls.

She forces herself to turn away, and she returns to the kitchen. Music from her mother’s record player drifts into the room, The Mamas and the Papas crooning.

_While I’m far away from you, my baby… I know it’s hard for you, my baby… Because it’s hard for me, my baby…_

She downs her glass of wine, and pours herself another. She hesitates, and studies the bottle, and seriously considers tossing the glass aside and going for the whole thing…

But she’s got a lecture tomorrow, a big one, an Intro one, and she can’t afford to be hungover.

It’s just Saw, and the memories and hauntings he brings; they’re so much.

There is only one photo in the kitchen, propped up in the window above the sink. It was taken on the Ersos’ last day in England, before the move to the States. Galen holds five-year-old Jyn in his arms, Lyra at their side, head pressed against Galen’s shoulder, one hand on Jyn’s calf. Jyn is waving at the camera, her grin toothy and gummy, free hand gripping Galen’s thin hair.

Jyn looks at her father’s face, noting how smooth it is, young and unlined.

“Damn you,” she whispers, and is surprised at her own voice.

_If there’s one thing I want you to do especially for me… Then it’s something that everybody needs…_

A loud banging noise snaps her out of her melancholic daze.

She straightens, nearly knocking over her freshly poured glass of wine, and turns her head as the banging starts up again. It’s coming from down the hall, and so she abandons the photo and the wine and the kitchen, going back the way she came. She walks under the ghosts, following the sound to her front door, as it shakes again.

“FBI,” a voice yells, and she freezes. “Open up.”

_What the hell._

“This is your last warning,” the voice yells again, and she takes a step forward, just in time for the door to be smashed open.

She is immediately blinded, flashlights beamed directly into her face, and she throws her hands up impulsively, covering her eyes. She can hear boots thudding over the hardwood floors of her house, radios crackling with voice and signal, a subtle clicking of guns brushing hands and bulletproof vests.

“Jyn Erso?”

She cracks her eyes open.

At first, she thinks she is still blinded, as the man before her is astonishingly pale, unusually tall, and completely hairless. His eyes are small and very dark, peering at her from behind round, thin-rimmed glasses. He wears a navy blue windbreaker, the word _FBI_ emblazoned on it.

“Yeah,” she says, responding instinctively to her own name.

“Ms. Erso, has your father contacted you?”

“My father?” she repeats.

“Yes, Galen Erso. Has he contacted you recently?”

She would laugh if she wasn’t in shock. “Of course not.”

The man frowns, and Jyn turns away. Her house has been flooded by people, men and women of all ages and races, stomping through the rooms, checking over bookcases and tables and rifling through her stack of unread newspapers and old mail. As she watches, one man picks up a framed photo of Galen, Lyra, and Jyn, and shoves it into a clear plastic bag, zipping it closed.

“Hey, wait a second,” Jyn says, starting for him.

_And tell all the stars above… This is dedicated to the one I love…_

The music is cut off when a woman lifts the needle off the record.

Jyn reaches the offending man, and seizes the photo from him. He lets her, surprise coloring his features, looking over Jyn’s head as the man who’d interrogated her comes up behind her.

“Ms. Erso, would you please--”

“Let go of me,” Jyn hisses, shaking his hand off her arm. “What the hell is this? What are you doing in my fucking house--”

“Ms. Erso, you have to come with us--”

“It’s _Doctor,_ and I don’t have to do anything,” she snaps, turning away. Another blue jacketed FBI agent has Lyra’s old research spread out on the dining room table, and she runs over, sweeping up the handwritten notes as best she can. “Leave that _alone,_ that’s _mine--”_

“Ms--Doctor, Erso--”

“No use, Kay, we--”

“Let’s sweep the upstairs, let’s go, let’s go--”

“--Check the garage, keep an eye out for chemical substances--”

“Look for notes--”

_“Doctor Erso--”_

“No,” Jyn yells, her arms full of her mother’s research, as someone pulls the photo of Galen, Lyra, and Jyn from the kitchen window. She runs over, her mother’s notes slipping out of her arms and floating to the floor, and she grabs the agent’s shoulder, shoving her back--

Something pricks her neck.

She stumbles, and sways, and slides to the floor, her mother’s words around her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL.
> 
> this story came about from chatter on a tumblr post i made, arguing that ANNIHILATION and THE LAST JEDI, two movies i love very much, would make a cool double feature, because they share a lot of themes/lessons. i stand by this. but they do not share a very similar plot, and i found that ROGUE ONE kind of did, and could, and uh...
> 
> the instinct was to have Jyn as Lena, which led into Cassian as Kane, but then I realized that would mean very little Cassian, and as someone who wrote a 500,000+ word series on Cassian; the thought was Inconceivable. so this story is very much a weird bastardization of ROGUE ONE and ANNIHILATION. 
> 
> this story relies heavily on ANNIHILATION, and the shooting script i used as a reference. some dialogue lifted verbatim from these sources. i am not a science person. just lean into the bizarre/unpractical.
> 
> Saw's ANNIHILATION counterpart is VERY DIFFERENT. they are NOT playing the same role. so don't worry about that.
> 
> The International Spy Museum is the coolest destination in Washington. don't @ me.
> 
> "This Is Dedicated To The One I Love" takes the place of "Helplessly Hoping" from ANNIHILATION. it is possible to interpret the lyrics of "Dedicated" to fit this story. a million thanks to my friend Megan for the song suggestion, the TITLE suggestion, and for reading this story and offering her brilliant thoughts. she was the MVP of the Nonsense, and is again here.
> 
> this chapter is quite short; they're gonna get longer. just have to parse through the introduction stuff.
> 
> This is the Most Niche of Niche Stories, so I would love comments. I am here and also on tumblr.
> 
>  
> 
> [tumblr](http://www.theputterer.tumblr.com)


	2. See You On The Other Side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It's called the Shimmer."

* * *

  

_We take everything in,_

_one wound after another._

\--Margaret Atwood, from _The Door_

 

* * *

 

She opens her eyes.

She’s lying on a cot, in a very white room. She blinks at the ceiling, squinting a little at the fluorescent light, and turns her head. She can see a simple sink, a small mirror, a short row of cupboards. Jyn straightens, and her stomach rolls, and she moves more quickly than she expected she could, darting to a toilet partially hidden by a half-wall, just in time to spill the contents of her stomach into it.

She vomits, choking and gasping, gripping the edge of the toilet. Her head is swimming, pounding a disjointed rhythm, and she’s oddly shivery.

After what could have been thirty seconds or three hours of vomiting, Jyn straightens.

She flushes the toilet, and shuffles out of the bathroom.

She is no longer alone in the white room.

A woman stands next to the sink. She’s dressed in head-to-toe white, practically blending into the wall behind her. Her hair is a shock of red, cut in a pixie cut, and her eyes are warm and inviting.

“I apologize,” the woman says. “You must feel dreadful. The sedative does that.”

“S… Sedative,” Jyn mumbles.

She manages to return to the cot, collapsing onto it. She looks up, and realizes the woman is not alone. There are two men with her. One is white, older, with thin, wispy reddish hair, and an irritated expression, dressed in army fatigues, holding a thick file in his arms. By the door is a Latino man, closer to Jyn’s age, standing uniformly straight, dressed similarly to the other man, eyeing Jyn with a disturbingly composed expression.

“Uh huh,” Jyn says, looking away from the man’s sharp brown eyes to face the woman. “And, uh. Why was I sedated? Where am I?”

“Yavin,” the woman says immediately. “An island in the Atlantic. About a thousand miles off the Florida coast.”

There is a lot to unpack here, considering Jyn has just been in _Maryland,_ but Jyn has other priorities. “Okay. Who are you?”

“Agent Mon Mothma,” the woman says, smiling warmly, but Jyn’s headache drains all the friendliness from the gesture. “Of the Counterterrorism Division.” At Jyn’s frown, she clarifies, “FBI.”

The woman looks just about the furthest thing from FBI, but Jyn guesses this is part of her act. She must do wonders undercover. _Mon Mothma_ sounds like a fake name, anyway.

“This is General Davits Draven, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command,” Mothma continues, nodding to the sour-faced man at her side. “And Captain Cassian Andor, also INSCOM.”

The man in the doorway does not so much as blink at his introduction.

“Well,” Jyn says. “I don’t think I have to introduce myself.”

Draven’s lip curls. “No you do not, Ms. Erso.”

“Doctor.”

If possible, his lip curls even harder. _“Doctor.”_

“What am I doing here?” Jyn asks. “On… Yavin. Or whatever.”

The name of the island sounds a little familiar. She probably read about it once or twice. She’s certain it is not a U.S. territory, so the appearance of FBI and U.S. Military Intelligence on the island is very strange indeed. Not to mention the appearance of a biology professor from Johns Hopkins.

Draven glances at Andor, nodding once. Andor steps into the room, closer to Jyn, and frowns down at her.

“When was the last time you were in contact with your father?”

Vaguely, Jyn can remember the FBI agent in her house asking her the same thing. Or something close to it.

“It’s been a long time,” Jyn snaps.

“Saw Gerrera has not heard from Galen Erso in ten years. Is that the same case for you?”

“You’ve spoken to Saw?”

Andor’s eyes glimmer. “We understand you did as well.”

“Why do you want to know about my father?” Jyn hisses. “And why did you have to drag me to the middle of the fucking ocean to do it? I haven’t done anything!”

“You haven’t,” Andor agrees. “But Galen Erso has.”

Jyn stares. “What has he done?”

 

* * *

 

“It’s called the Shimmer.”

Mothma’s words seem to come from somewhere far away.

Jyn’s throat is very dry.

She and Mothma are standing on the roof of the facility, at the edge of Yavin. A dozen telescopes are scattered on the railing, pointed to an island a relatively short distance away, perhaps a few miles or so. Jyn had frowned at the distant island, thinking it oddly fuzzy-looking, had wondered if there was a storm rolling in, until she’d pressed her eye to the telescope and really _looked_ at the other island.

Because that island is surrounded by a wall. But _wall_ is an incorrect noun for what she’s seeing. Walls don’t move. Walls are solid.

This wall is twisting, and shivering, and spasming.

Shimmering.

Shades of green, purple, blue, and yellow seep in the air, beginning at the grassline past the beach, rising up into the sky. The wall is semi-translucent, revealing trees and plant life on the other side of the glossy barrier, seemingly unharmed by the unnatural occurrence. The Shimmer does not appear to be making any noise, only shifting in an oddly physical way, unfurling patterns and designs, symmetrical and asymmetrical, and constantly changing.

“What is it?” Jyn asks.

“We aren’t sure,” Mothma murmurs. “It’s a… You could call it a force field. Except it does allow things in. But it prevents anything from coming out. So, perhaps, it’d be more accurate to call it a very one-sided force field; where it is more important that nothing gets out, than nothing gets in.”

“Why… Why is it _there?”_

Mothma’s mouth thins. “Your father put it there.”

 

* * *

 

They sit her on a single, rickety chair in a dark room. Mothma gives Jyn a firm nod, and then leaves, abandoning Jyn to sit in the dark, Andor standing guard at the door behind her. In front of Jyn, a projector, not unlike the one Jyn had used to show her seminar the film of a dividing cell (and how long ago was that?) hums to life.

Her father’s face fills the screen, and Jyn gasps.

Galen looks old, so old. Dark bags linger under his eyes, and his hair is thin and wispy looking, like a soft breeze could knock it all away. He’s dressed in some kind of olive-colored uniform, and his forehead is beaded with sweat.

“Hopefully Bodhi has gotten away,” Galen murmurs. “And this message has been passed into the right hands. I have… There is very little time. You must hurry. The Empire, it’s… The weapon. It’s almost ready.”

_Empire? Weapon?_

Galen continues to speak, and Jyn’s entire life unravels.

She finally learns where her father has been all this time, all her life.

He’s been working for an independent research group; has been, since he took a leave of absence from his job at the Pentagon, in order to take a long sabbatical around Europe, all in an effort to clear his head after Lyra’s sudden death. While in Russia, he ran into a man called Orson Krennic, a man who Galen had been friends with while they’d both been students at Cambridge. Krennic was working for a scientific research group called the Empire, and had an opening for a physicist interested in energy and applied physics.

The job was headquartered in Moscow, and Galen decided the relocation out of the States would be for the best.

Jyn had been in her second year at the California girls school when he made the move.

Initially, the Empire had given him a sizeable grant, and let him embark on his own theories and experiments at his leisure. He had loved the work, loved having the time and the freedom, and even liked the cold Russian climate.

And then Galen got an idea. An idea for a new form of clean energy, one that might be able to power entire cities, and maybe one day, whole countries. It would be a grand, ambitious project, and so Galen asked Krennic to get involved; Krennic was also a physicist, though he was focused in nuclear and particle physics.

Krennic came aboard. The idea, the project, swallowed the two men.

“I was hooked,” Galen whispers in the video. “I thought we could change the world. But I was interested in _saving_ it; and Krennic was interested in _destroying_ it.”

Because this new energy producer; it _could_ be implemented as a weapon. One poised to commit mass destruction.

“I called it… I called it my Star,” Galen says, and Jyn’s heart breaks, because _Stardust, my Stardust._ “Because it was… It was anchoring, and critical, and so beautiful to behold. So powerful. But Krennic… I heard him call it the _Death Star._ And I knew what I’d done. I had created a doomsday device.”

The Star, or Death Star, Galen says, is located in Russia, hidden underground until the Empire can find a buyer. They have no qualms about who they sell to; the highest bidder wins the weapon. And from there, it can annihilate whatever it’s aimed at.

Buildings. Cities.

Maybe, one day: entire countries.

“It must be stopped,” Galen begs. “It must be. And there’s a way.”

The Empire owns a small island in the Atlantic, simply called Scarif. It’s remote, and unpopulated; the Empire uses it as a backup data storage facility, should their hidden locations in Russia be compromised and raided. Housed on the island is a fortress, and within this fortress are blueprints and maps of all the projects the Empire is working on, Death Star included.

“The plans for the weapon are there,” Galen says. “And I am sure they will reveal a weak spot of some kind, or give you enough information on the Star to work out how it might be destroyed. But I cannot get the plans out of where I am. Krennic controls all of my work, all of my… But the plans there. Those are not under his thumb. You have a chance. As do I. Once Bodhi leaves, I will be going to Scarif. I will try to steal the plans myself.”

“Papa,” Jyn whispers.

“Scarif is protected,” Galen says. “But not by soldiers, but by a… A security force. I have never seen it in person, but it was one of my earlier projects. A theoretical shield, a cutting-edge form of security. I call it the Shimmer. Penetrable, but able to prevent anyone from reaching what the shield was there to protect. I worked with a psychiatrist, a toxicologist, a geneticist, a neuroscientist, and a chemist, and we designed the Shimmer to actively discourage any attempts at infiltration, via… Hallucinatory elements, natural barriers, genetic editing, all in a most…” Galen swallows hard, and looks away. “I was in a dark place after my wife died. I was… I was haunted, and afraid, and searching for a way to traverse my grief and guilt. And my guilt at what I did to my daughter. For abandoning her.”

_Papa. No._

“So, the Shimmer. It is a dark thing,” Galen says. “I am not proud of it. I am not… Anyone who enters the Shimmer, anyone who walks the island; they will not be the person they were before they entered it.”

Tears are sliding down Jyn’s face. She feels both numb, and like she’s on fire.

“That is why…” Galen closes his eyes for a moment, opening them again. “That is why I ask you to reach out to my daughter. Jyn Erso. She’s a biology professor at Johns Hopkins. She is… She is the light of my life. I have… Everything I… I failed her. I only ever wanted… I…”

Her father is sobbing, and Jyn, on the other side of this recorded video, the other side of the sea; she weeps with him.

“Please,” Galen begs. “Please, you _have to find her._ Once the Empire realizes what I’ve done, that I’ve betrayed them; they will go after her. You have to make sure she’s safe. Please. They threatened her to keep me with them, and it worked, but now I…” he sighs. “I think of how ashamed she would be of me, if she knew what I had done. For her. It was all, always, for her.”

_No, Papa. No._

_I was not worth it. Any of it._

_It’s my fault. I pushed you away. I hated you, and I didn’t have a reason to. It wasn’t you._

_It wasn’t you._

“So, please just… Just tell her how sorry I am. And that I love her. I haven’t spoken to her in ten years, and she hates me, and I… I do not expect her forgiveness, but perhaps I can… I can steal the plans. And that can be my absolution. But if I cannot, if I fail; you must send someone who can.”

Galen looks up then, and stares directly into the grainy camera recording him, and Jyn thinks, wildly, that while she is Lyra’s spitting image, she undeniably inherited Galen’s green eyes.

“Bodhi will help,” Galen says, firmly. “Please. Spare him. He still has a chance. As for me, I will go to Scarif.” He pauses, and adds, “To whoever is watching this; see you on the other side.”

_Click._

The video switches off, and the room is pitch-black.

Jyn heaves, trembling on her rickety chair, causing it to creak more loudly. She can’t see anything around her, all the lights in the room out, the only light coming in from the open doorway behind her. She lets herself sob, though she doesn’t think she could do anything to prevent it. She feels wrung out, undone, and her heart is so painfully heavy.

_Papa, what have you done?_

Soft footsteps interrupt her bleating sobs, and she sniffles, and turns her head.

Andor crouches on the ground in front of her.

He studies her face in the dim light from the hallway, and she forces herself to meet his gaze, trying to swallow her remaining, blubbering sobs. The blankness of his expression has lessened slightly, a mask slipping off; his brown eyes are big, and dark, a frown tugging at his mouth, but there is a hint of compassion. Maybe even some sympathy.

“Why did you show me this,” she croaks.

“Agent Mothma’s idea,” Andor murmurs. “She’s… She’s generous.”

“Why am I here.”

“We’ve already sent a team to Scarif, Dr. Erso,” Andor says. “To find the fortress, and the plans. No one has returned. They’ve gone radio silent. Agent Mothma and General Draven, and all their supervisors, and their supervisors’ supervisors… Everyone is getting very nervous. Your father’s weapon has been confirmed--”

“It has?”

Andor’s expression tightens. “Did you hear about the explosion in Jedha?”

Her heart stops. “Are you saying--”

“The media hasn’t even heard the worst yet. NiJedha is gone, Dr. Erso. Annihilated. A city of nearly two-hundred thousand, all dead. Like they were never there.”

“It was my father’s weapon?”

Andor nods. “We have very little intelligence on it, but it seems so. Jedha is a no man’s land for the major players in the region. It’s a good place to test a weapon with very little witnesses, and very little pushback.”

Jyn’s breathing is still shaky, coming in ragged gasps, and she grips the seat under her, digging her nails into the wood. Andor watches her.

“You haven’t told me why _I’m_ here, Captain Andor,” Jyn whispers.

“We sent a team to Scarif as soon as we got your father’s message,” Andor says. “We were planning on bringing you in to Washington, to be interviewed, but with the attack on Jedha, and the disappearance of the soldiers on Scarif… More aggressive measures had to be taken.”

_Like sedating me and kidnapping me from my own house._

“But you know my father hasn’t gotten in contact with me in ten years,” Jyn says, nodding at the blank screen on the wall.

“We needed you to confirm that.”

“And I did. Do you believe me?”

“I do.”

That gives her pause. Andor’s lips twist, like he maybe wasn’t planning on saying so much.

“We don’t know anything about the Shimmer, Dr. Erso,” Andor says. “Our first team consisted of soldiers, and FBI agents, and… We never heard from them again. This second team will be more diverse. One soldier. One FBI agent, with a background in psychology. And then a paramedic. A physicist. An anthropologist. And, perhaps… A biologist.”

“You want me to go with this team, into the Shimmer,” Jyn summarizes.

“The first team… Whatever they found in the Shimmer, they almost certainly didn’t know how to deal with it,” Andor says. “What it was, or what it was doing. To them. We think they’re all dead, but… They could be lost. Or trapped. A team that includes scientists might be able to help them; it was a group of scientists who created the Shimmer, after all. And since this is your father’s work… You could be the one best equipped to navigate it. You know him better than anyone else here does.”

Jyn swallows.

Andor watches her.

“Orson Krennic wants to destroy the world. Galen Erso wants to save it. What do you want, Dr. Erso?”

She looks away from Andor’s gaze, looking down at herself, at her bare, unblemished arms. Sometime between Baltimore and Yavin, she was taken out of her clothes and put into plain white scrubs. Under her scrub top, she can see her crystal necklace.

She fishes it out of her shirt, holding it in her hand.

“Do you know what this is?” she asks Andor.

He blinks. “No.”

“It’s a kyber crystal,” Jyn says. “My parents studied them; that was how they met, actually. Kyber crystals are very rare, found only in the deepest caves around the world. My mother would go on digs specifically to find kyber crystals, and my father would experiment on them. They met on one such excavation, in Iceland, and… This necklace was my mother’s. My father has a matching one.”

She clears her throat. Andor watches her.

“They both thought there was something unique about the crystal, that it could be used as a power source,” Jyn says. “Or maybe something even more ambitious, only waiting to be discovered.”

Andor’s eyebrows rise. “Were they right? Can it?”

She lets the crystal fall to her shirt.

“No,” she says. “It’s just a shiny rock.”

Andor stares at her.

She sighs.

“My father liked pushing the boundaries of modern science,” Jyn says. “So while his failures are innocuous, his successes are… Radical. I don’t know if I can bring anything… personal, to the team. I haven’t spoken to him in a decade, and we weren’t even close before that. I never knew he was capable of building something like this.”

_“Everything I do, I do to protect you. Do you understand?”_

“But I’m a damn good biologist,” Jyn says, shoving her father’s voice away. “If this Shimmer has… Has affected the island at a biological level, then I can help. And I want to help. I want to get the plans for my father’s weapon. I want to destroy it.”

Andor studies her, and she stares right back.

He nods.

“Saving the world it is.”

 

* * *

 

Night has fallen over Yavin. Jyn returns to the balcony, frowning at Scarif in the distance, a stretch of black sea separating the two islands. She can’t see the Shimmer from here, but she does not doubt it is there, that it’s watching her. Studying her. Analyzing her.

_Are you there, Papa? Are you on the island?_

The sound of a throat clearing interrupts her morose thoughts, and she turns her head.

A man stands at her side. He’s Chinese, a few inches taller than her, with short black hair and a clean-shaven face. His smile is easy-going, like he’s on a tropical vacation, and not a short distance away from an unknown and terrifying environment.

But it is not the smile she finds most surprising; it’s his eyes. They are a pale, sky blue, and obviously sightless.

“I’m sorry,” Jyn says, though she isn’t sure what she’s apologizing for.

“I am the one interrupting your pensive meditation,” the man says in a clipped accent, smile widening. “But I thought I would see if you would like some company.”

“Oh, no, I’m--”

“My husband and I are getting on the nerves of our third wheel,” the man interjects. “He could use some support. Join us?”

She blinks.

“We have beer,” the man adds. “Or tea if you’d prefer to be sober.”

“S-Sure,” Jyn says, and feels herself leave the railing, following the blind man, who she finds unexpectedly spry and quick for being blind, to one of the many picnic tables scattered over the patio. All of the tables are empty, save for one.

Sitting at the table are two men. One is also Chinese, but larger than the first man, all muscle and wild black hair, skin tan and sun-spotted; the other is young, close to Jyn’s age, with rich brown skin and slightly curly black hair, tied up in a messy bun at his neck. While the young man has a small circle of empty beer bottles scattered before him, the older man holds only a cup of tea in his hands.

“I have found another drinking partner,” the first man announces.

The large man offers a grunt in greeting, and fishes a beer out of the cooler at his feet. He pulls a lighter out of his pocket, sticks the edge under the cap, and throws the cap off in one quick move. He holds the bottle out to Jyn.

“Um, thanks,” Jyn manages.

“Sit, sit,” the first man implores. Jyn wonders if she’s being kidnapped again.

“Introductions,” the first man says. “I am Dr. Chirrut Imwe. This is my husband, Sergeant Baze Malbus, and our third wheel, Bodhi Rook.”

“No titles for me,” Bodhi says, smile thin and a little watery.

“Don’t let the lack of titles fool you,” Baze mutters. “Bodhi is the smartest of us all.”

Bodhi’s face flushes. Chirrut grins.

“I’m Jyn,” Jyn says, and bites her lip.

She’s hesitant to offer up her surname, hesitant to say _Erso,_ to see the faces of this odd group of drinking buddies turn closed-off and wary. It’s been a long time since Jyn has spent time with friends, drinking and shooting the shit, and between the stress and horror of the day, what with her father’s treachery exposed, and the nausea of the sedative, she could use a little camaraderie.

“I’m a biologist,” she says, in lieu of the surname.

Unexpectedly, Chirrut cackles, and Baze groans.

“Pay up,” Chirrut says, stretching his hand over the table. Jyn stares as both Bodhi and Baze fumble into their pockets for coins and bills.

“What did I miss?” Jyn asks.

“I said you were a scientist, specializing in a natural science,” Chirrut says. “Baze guessed soldier. Bodhi guessed social science.”

“I should’ve known you were gonna be right, Chirrut,” Bodhi mumbles. “You would have pegged a social sciences comrade on the spot.”

“Like you failed to pinpoint a fellow natural sciences academic?”

“What’s your specialty?” Jyn interjects, offering Bodhi a hesitant smile. He returns it.

“Physics,” Bodhi replies. His voice is quiet, his accent English, and Jyn makes a note to ask him where he grew up. That seems like something a new friend would ask about. “Molecular, mostly. That’s, uh, what I focused on at university.”

Jyn cocks her head. “What area do you study now?”

Bodhi looks away.

Confused, Jyn looks at Chirrut and Baze for help. Both men are suddenly uncomfortable. Chirrut’s warm expression has clouded, while Baze is studying his cup of tea with apparent fascination.

“I’m the whistleblower,” Bodhi says.

Jyn frowns. “You mean…”

“If they’re just letting you walk freely around the compound, then you already know about Galen Erso,” Bodhi says. He’s wrapped up tightly in a thick black sweater, sleeves hanging over his wrists, and she can see the edge of a bandage peeking out at her from his left wrist. “I brought the recording he made to the FBI. From the Empire.”

_“Bodhi will help,” Galen says, firmly. “Please. Spare him. He still has a chance.”_

“You were part of the Empire,” Jyn breathes, recalling her father’s words. Bodhi’s mouth twitches.

“Yep. That’s why Chirrut dragged you over here. All the soldiers and agents on base avoid me like the plague, even though I didn’t even get to _see_ Galen’s video, _and_ brought it to their attention. It doesn’t matter. They all think I’m a terrorist. To most of them, I’ve got the right look for one.”

Sardonicism colors his tone, and his eyes harden, and Jyn feels sympathy swell up in her.

She’s the daughter of a terrorist, but she has the luxury of being able to hide that fact with her race as a shield.

“Bodhi is good,” Chirrut announces. “A kind soul. He did the right thing.”

“Yes,” Baze says, voice suddenly louder than it had been.

Jyn nods in fervent agreement, and Bodhi blinks, surprised by her support.

“So, you’re a physicist,” she says. “And you’re here because you brought… Erso’s, video. Chirrut, Baze, why are you here?”

“I’m a linguistic anthropologist at the State Department,” Chirrut announces. “I was accosted at work by Agent Mothma, asking me if I was interested in acting as a consultant for a case. She was particularly interested in employing both myself and my husband. Baze is a paramedic.”

_Physicist. Anthropologist. Paramedic._

_Oh._

“You’re the new team,” Jyn says. “Going into the Shimmer.”

The three men look at her.

“I’m joining you,” Jyn adds, and they brighten.

“No shit,” Baze says.

Jyn nods. “Yeah, uh. I’m a professor at Johns Hopkins. Cell biology, cell life cycles.”

“Ivy League,” Bodhi remarks, and Jyn doesn’t have the heart to correct him.

“So, yeah, I’m with you,” she says. “Do you know who the others are?”

“Agent Tuesso,” Chirrut says, and Bodhi grimaces while Baze snorts. “He has a background in psychology, I understand. He is… Very intense. By the book.”

“He’s a goddamn robot,” Baze insists.

“He’s okay,” Bodhi mumbles.

Chirrut shrugs. “And Captain Andor, of course.”

Jyn straightens. “Andor?”

“The Captain. Yes.”

Andor had conveniently neglected to mention he was part of the team Jyn had joined. She wonders over this omission, but can’t find an obvious ulterior motive.

“What do you think about him?” Jyn asks.

“He’s quiet,” Bodhi offers. “He’s only said about ten words to me. His superior; Draven, I think. He’s… Well. Let’s say I prefer Captain Andor.”

“He’s carrying a prison,” Chirrut says, and Jyn is not the only one who stares at him.

“He’s what?” Baze asks, in the tone of the long-suffering.

“He’s a soldier, but he does not want to be,” Chirrut says. “He just does not know anything more. There is more than one sort of prison; many are invisible, and some are carried. The Captain carries his wherever he goes. He will carry it into the Shimmer. We will _all_ be carrying something into the Shimmer.”

Jyn is not really sure what to make of this. Luckily for her, Bodhi seems similarly confused, while Baze gives the softest of sighs.

“You’re not a fucking shrink, Chirrut,” he says.

“Prison, or… Not,” Jyn says, giving Chirrut an uncertain glance. The man cannot see her turn her head, but he _winks_ at her, and she stares. “Um, prison or not; he seems okay to me.”

“Agreed,” Baze says.

“Well then.” Chirrut picks up his beer bottle, and Bodhi mirrors him, and Jyn follows suit, even as she’s not sure why. Baze awkwardly lifts his cup of tea. “To Rogue One.”

“Rogue One?” Jyn repeats.

Baze rolls his eyes. “We don’t have a team name, being civilians and all. That is what Chirrut has decided to call us.”

“I like it,” Bodhi says.

Jyn laughs. “I do too.”

“It’s settled then,” Chirrut says with a grin. “Rogue One.”

“Rogue One,” the others chorus, and click their drinks.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the gang's all here!!! [Kay appeared in the first chapter.] for the record: everyone is much closer to the age of the actor who portrayed them in ROGUE ONE than their character is in canon.
> 
> it's extremely difficult to describe the look of the Shimmer. here are a couple links, to make more clear what Jyn would be seeing from Yavin: https://goo.gl/images/Yp68rR and https://goo.gl/images/n8rfj2 .
> 
> playing fast and loose with the military stuff in this story, to best fit the ROGUE ONE parameters.
> 
> also being played fast and loose: the science in this story. the creation and story of the Shimmer is different here than in ANNIHILATION. really putting the fiction in science fiction.
> 
> for those who may be curious: I do an every-other-day posting schedule, just in case a comment comes up with something i need to address or clarify. the story, as it stands, is 11 chapters long, and will be posted in its entirety by/on May 13.


	3. Albatross

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So; what about you? Why do you walk into the Shimmer?”

* * *

  

_I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am, I am, I am._

\--Sylvia Plath, from _The Bell Jar_

 

* * *

  

Jyn wakes at four a.m., and is immediately given orders to report to the ground floor of the compound.

She gets a little lost on her way, but manages to find a spacious conference room. A large table takes up the bulk of the room’s space, projecting a three-dimensional map of an island she guesses to be Scarif. Standing at the head of the table is Agent Mothma, conversing with General Draven, whose grim expression seems to have intensified overnight.

Jyn spots Chirrut and Baze, talking quietly in a corner. Bodhi is seated near the table’s end, fiddling with the straps of the gray jumpsuit he’s wearing. Also in the room is Andor, who pauses his speaking to nod curtly at Jyn. The man standing with him turns around, and Jyn recognizes the tall, pale FBI agent who had accosted her in her house.

It looks like he might be the FBI agent rounding out their team, Tuesso. Naturally.

She walks over to them.

“Agent,” she says, and the pale man frowns.

“That’s right, you’ve already met,” Andor notes.

“He jammed a sedative into my neck.”

“You were being combative, Doctor,” the pale man insists, and Jyn scowls. “No matter. We are on the same team. I am Agent Kay Tuesso.”

He holds out his hand, and Jyn wars with herself for a moment before accepting his handshake. His hand is very cold, and his face is oddly devoid of any obvious emotion or thought, and Jyn remembers Baze calling the man a robot.

She gets why.

“Alright,” Draven calls, and Jyn takes the excuse to turn away from Tuesso.

Mothma steps closer to the table, and the occupants of the room gather around it.

“You will be leaving for Scarif in two hours,” she says, and Jyn blinks. She’d known they were on a time crunch, but such an immediate departure still takes her by surprise. None of the others seem to share her feeling. “Your team will consist of the six of you, with General Draven and myself monitoring your progress from this room in the compound.”

“Your mission goal,” Draven says, “Is to enter the Shimmer, and make your way to the fortress. Our aerial surveillance of the island suggests the fortress can be found in the center of it.”

As he speaks, the holographic map of the island on the table shifts, outlining a route from the beach to the middle of the island.

“Scarif is about two hundred and thirty-four square miles. The size of Chicago. We… Encourage, you to walk as quickly as you can, as often as you can.”

Jyn glances at the others. That’s more walking than she usually does, but desperate times. Bodhi looks faintly nauseous.

“Galen Erso’s message suggests there will be no… human guards at the fortress,” Draven says. “But we don’t know for sure, and have no doubt it will still be fortified. Agent Tuesso and Captain Andor will be the leads on breaching the fortress, with the assistance of Sergeant Malbus.” He nods at Baze. “We know you’ve been out of the Military for nearly thirty years, but we’re counting on your demolitions expertise, should we need it.”

Baze gives a short nod back.

Jyn feels very far out of her depth.

“As to what kind of defenses you are likely to encounter in the Shimmer…” Mothma sighs. “We just don’t have the intelligence. It’s possible the first team is still navigating the island, and could even breach the fortress at any moment. But prepare for the worst.”

Andor’s jaw is very tight.

“It’s also possible Galen Erso is on the island as well,” Mothma says. “If you encounter him, we expect you to bring him back to Yavin upon the end of your mission.”

She looks at Jyn as she speaks, and Jyn blinks back, keeping her face smooth.

No one has explicitly outed Jyn as Galen’s daughter, not even Tuesso, who is very aware of this. She wonders how long this luck of hers can hold.

“Backpacks have already been outfitted with supplies for each of you,” Draven says. “Tuesso, Andor, and Malbus have all been cleared to use firearms. You will all be equipped with a radio, GPS, rations, a medical kit, camping supplies, and a satellite phone. If you have concerns with other supplies you may need beyond those, please speak with Tuesso or Andor before your departure. Any questions?”

Six heads shake no.

Mothma smiles.

“Good luck.”

 

* * *

 

As soon as Mothma and Draven leave, and the team begins to speak with one another, Jyn goes to Andor, snagging his arm, and pulling him to the side.

“What is it?” he asks, allowing her to move him.

“Give me a gun.”

He blinks. “I don’t think so.”

“I know how to use one.”

His eyebrows soar. “Really.”

“I doubt that,” a new voice comments, and Jyn fights the urge to roll her eyes as Tuesso joins them.

“Saw Gerrera,” Jyn says. “You interviewed him. Probably compiled a big scary file about him. You must know that he was a marine.”

Tuesso frowns. “And?”

_“And,”_ Jyn hisses, “Saw was the closest thing I had to a guardian when I was living in L.A. and going to USC. We hung out a lot, outside of class, and he took me to a shooting range a few times. He taught me how to use a gun.”

“Why did he do that?” Tuesso demands, sounding weirdly offended.

“Because I asked him to,” Jyn says. “I was curious.”

“Do you have a license?”

Jyn hesitates. “No. I don’t own a gun.”

“But you know how to use one.”

The comment comes from Andor. Unlike Tuesso, who is openly scoffing, Andor looks thoughtful. Jyn feels a surge of hope.

“We don’t know what’s in there,” Jyn says, gesturing to the map on the table. “What we do know is that it’s _dangerous._ Deadly, even. I know how to use a gun. And I have a right to defend myself.”

“You’re also the daughter of the creator of the Shimmer,” Tuesso snaps. “We don’t know what you might do on that island--”

“No more than I know you, who didn’t hesitate to _stab me in the neck with a needle,”_ Jyn growls. Tuesso is clearly a lost cause, so she turns to Andor. “Trust goes both ways.”

He’s quiet, studying her face, and Jyn thinks of Chirrut’s words, of invisible prisons and carrying things into the Shimmer, and wonders what he’s thinking, what he’s looking for.

After a moment, he nods.

“Okay.”

_“Okay?”_

“Kay,” Andor sighs, turning to Tuesso, whose mouth has dropped open in shock. Jyn allows herself a moment of vindictive pleasure. “I’m lead on this, you know that. It’s my call.”

Tuesso scowls, but to Jyn’s surprise, he doesn’t argue. Instead, he turns, and walks away, gesturing for the others to follow. Bodhi shoots Jyn a concerned look as he passes, but she waves him off. Then it’s only her and Andor in the room.

“Thank you,” Jyn says.

“I’m sorry about Kay,” Andor says. “He’s seen a lot, with his work, and he… He tends to be very distrustful, and suspicious of people. He’ll get used to you.”

“You know him well?”

Andor nods. “We’ve known each other since we were kids. Grew up on the same block in D.C.” He clears his throat. “He’s a good man. He’s just very opinionated, intense, and by the book. Doesn’t like working outside of his set parameters. But he is very smart, and… Just requires a little patience.”

She thinks of Bodhi’s shrugging opinion of Tuesso, and Baze’s comment that the man is a robot.

Could be worse, she supposes.

“Alright,” she says.

Andor nods at her, and goes to leave, but she grabs his arm again and stops him.

“Um, two more things,” she says. “Can I get a field microscope? And other equipment? I want to find out what I can about the Shimmer.”

Andor nods. “Shouldn’t be a problem. What’s the other thing?”

“I wanted to see if you could maybe keep it quiet that Galen is my father.”

He frowns. “Why?”

“You saw how Kay reacted,” Jyn says. “I don’t want to give the others any reason to distrust me.”

“Not telling them Galen is your father could be seen as a reason for distrust.”

“They can find out after we get back. For now, I want to be Jyn. A biologist. Part of the team.”

Andor gives another deep sigh.

“Fine,” he says. “I won’t say anything. I’ll talk to Kay, but I make no promises about him, Dr. Erso.”

“Fair,” Jyn agrees. “Thank you. And you should probably start getting used to calling me Jyn.”

“Jyn,” Andor says, offering a small smile. He holds out his hand. “I’m Cassian.”

His hand is warm in hers, and she thinks, oddly, _Cassian. Cassian._

“And don’t thank me yet,” he adds. “We’ve still got to make it through the Shimmer.”

 

* * *

 

Tuesso corners her before she can go get something to eat.

“We have paperwork for you to sign,” he says, and she follows him into a small office.

The office is very empty, minimally decorated, as she expected from a compound that has been very hastily and recently moved into. The window is dirty, grimy with disuse, and the chairs look very secondhand. The only new things in the room are a box of green tea and can of almonds on the desk, and a small portable refrigerator; through the glass door, Jyn can see stacks of cans of ginger ale and bottles of apple juice.

Tuesso catches her gaze. “Can I offer you anything?”

“No, thank you,” Jyn says, stiffly, and sits in the chair in front of the desk. “Trying to eat healthy?”

“Something like that,” Tuesso replies, sitting in the patchy red office chair behind the desk. Jyn watches him retrieve a large file from a drawer. He shuffles through it for a moment, before tugging out an alarmingly thick packet of papers.

“So,” he says, laying the packet out and pointing at it. “This is a standard non-disclosure agreement of whatever you may see or encounter on Scarif, along with a statement that you do not hold the U.S. government liable for any injuries or illnesses that may befall you on the island, including and not limited to death.”

Her eyebrows soar. “Is that likely?”

“Your father’s weapon, i.e. the _Shimmer,”_ Tuesso says, eyes dispassionate, “Is all but entirely unknown to us. We’re covering our bases, dotting our i’s. That kind of thing. Surely you can understand, Doctor.”

“How do you mean?”

Tuesso smiles. “We’re a science experiment. You have to let your test subjects be aware of any potential side effects.”

She nods, and looks down at the paper. The logical and practical side of her knows she should go through it carefully, read every line, ask a million questions to make sure she understands everything. But she’s uncomfortably aware that time is of the essence, that they are very much running out of it, and so she takes the ballpoint pen and signs and initials wherever Tuesso points.

One word catches her eye, a couple pages in.

“Radiation?” Jyn repeats.

“Mm. Possibly. We don’t know what kind of weapons the Shimmer might hold.”

“So, possible _long-term_ side effects,” Jyn says. She studies the paper, before looking back up at Tuesso. “Did you have to sign one of these things?”

He blinks. “It goes with the job.”

“Were you given a choice?”

“A choice?”

“To go, or not to go.”

His expression doesn’t change. “This mission is… unorthodox. Unusual. Not exactly part of my job description, or _anyone’s_ , really. We’re only taking volunteers. But someone has to go.”

“And it’s going to be you? Why not someone else from your… Your team? Or your boss?”

“Because I said I would go.”

Tuesso’s voice is calm, and smooth, like they’re discussing the weather during a normal workday, and not the potentially lethal hazards of exploring a totally new environment. She looks at Tuesso’s pale face, smooth bald head, and remembers Baze calling him a robot.

_Well._

“Okay,” she says.

She finishes signing the forms.

 

* * *

 

She’s given gray cargo pants, a black tank, a gray flannel button-down, a black jacket, and hiking boots. She puts the whole ensemble on, privately wishing she could have been allowed to pack some clothes before being kidnapped from her house. She’d thought the gray weather of Baltimore was suffocating; seeing herself wearing so much gray is its own kind of dismal.

Cassian intercepts her in the hall, and gives her a handgun. He pauses, as if to say something to her, and she frowns, but then Draven calls his name and he walks away without a word.

She exits the compound, shuffling the massive hiking backpack on her shoulders as she goes. The rocky beach of Yavin leads down to the dark blue ocean, lapping at a short wooden dock, at the end of which rests a boat, tethered but ready to go.

It’s still early in the morning, the sun rising above the horizon.

Bodhi is the only person on the dock. His back is to her, and he’s facing the distant Scarif, fuzzy with the Shimmer.

She joins him.

“You okay?”

Bodhi looks at her. “Uh, yeah. Fine.”

She smiles. “It’s okay to be scared.”

“Sure, sure,” Bodhi mumbles. “It’s a lot, you know?”

“Definitely.”

“This is so far out of my comfort zone,” Bodhi says. “I don’t… I’ve only gone hiking, like, twice. And the Empire recruited me straight out of university. I’ve never even been to the States, and now I’ve met about two dozen U.S. soldiers and FBI agents.”

“Yeah,” Jyn murmurs. “I get what you mean.”

Bodhi frowns, glancing at her again. “How’d you get wrapped up in this? Me, I’m the whistleblower from the Empire, and a physicist, so I might be able to help traverse whatever the Shimmer is. Agent Tuesso’s with Counterterrorism, and Captain Andor’s Army Intelligence. Chirrut’s the best anthropologist in the U.S. government, and Baze is a veteran and paramedic. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you’re brilliant, but… Do you do this sort of thing a lot?”

She laughs. “Not at all. But, um…”

She thinks Bodhi would have said something if he knew she was Galen’s daughter. He’d already told her he hadn’t seen her father’s video, and she knows it’s possible her father never mentioned her to him directly.

“Galen Erso worked with this other scientist, Saw Gerrera,” she says. “From my understanding, they worked together at the Pentagon. And Saw considers me to be his protégée. He’s… Saw is too old for this sort of thing, but I’m not. I think Agent Mothma asked me, thinking if she can’t have Saw, I’m the next best thing.”

None of this, she thinks, is a lie.

“Makes sense,” Bodhi says. “Still. Hell of a reason to go into the Shimmer.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…” Bodhi licks his lips, eyes locked on Scarif, across the sea. “This could be a suicide mission. You… Galen, and those scientists he worked with? They’re all brilliant. Next-level, cutting edge. The kind of people you pray are on your side. Because working against them? Not only are they lethal, they’re… Dangerous. Dangerous in a way you never want to see in real life, and barely want to read about in comic books.”

She almost snorts. _“Comics?_ Really?”

Bodhi is not amused. He turns to her, eyes dark and serious. “I know it sounds stupid. But comics don’t follow our laws. _Any_ of our laws. Legal, but scientific, too. They bend the rules. Anything goes. If the writer and artist want someone to have the ability to shapeshift, they will. And if they want them to be able to… to clone someone with… With their _mind,_ then that can happen too. Creator’s choice.”

Jyn can’t really picture her father as a comic book person, but she thinks she knows what Bodhi means.

The Shimmer is so extraordinary, so unknown; nothing like it has ever existed before. Going from her father’s message, it almost certainly should _not_ exist.

It does sound a little like the twisted experiment of a fictitious evil scientist.

“So if this is a suicide mission,” Bodhi says, “Then everyone needs to have a really good reason to go into the Shimmer.”

“And your reason…”

“I worked for the Empire,” Bodhi murmurs, and his eyes soften, his pain clear. “I… I helped build the weapon. And now it’s destroyed NiJedha, and… That’s on me. That’s my fault. I’ve done… I have done so many horrible things. I’ve failed to prevent so much. But Jedha, _Jedha…”_

The sun lights up his face, and she notices how shiny his cheeks are, and she watches the tears fall.

“Bodhi,” Jyn whispers, but he shakes his head.

“Galen said we have a chance,” he says. “To make things right. That’s why he gave me his message, and why he went into the Shimmer. And that’s why _I’m_ going into the Shimmer, too. To make things right.”

She nods. “That’s a good reason.”

“Yeah,” Bodhi agrees. “So; what about you? Why do you walk into the Shimmer?”

The answer, Jyn thinks, has to do with her father.

She thinks of her father’s broken face, his tears, his clear regret. She thinks of the years she spent hating him for abandoning her, for disappearing, for failing to communicate. She thinks of the solid decade where he never sent a word, where she never bothered to try and find him. She thinks of missed graduations, and never sent emails. She thinks of her mother’s lonely grave in Maryland.

She thinks of how so many of those things are her own fault. She thinks of how she pushed him away. She thinks of how she also left him. She thinks of how many calls she ignored. She thinks of yelling and cursing. She thinks of running.

She thinks of her father, walking into the Shimmer. Being there right now.

Just on the other side.

She can still find him. She can get her in-person apology.

And she can give hers, too.

And then, maybe; she will be able to forgive.

But Bodhi Rook does not know Galen is her father.

So to Bodhi now, she shrugs.

“To steal the plans for the Death Star,” she says, picking Krennic’s name for the weapon over her father’s, because _Stardust, my Stardust._

And she thinks of Cassian Andor, and what she had said to him.

“To save the world,” Jyn says. “How’s that for a reason?”

Bodhi smiles.

“The best one.”

 

* * *

 

They all pile into the boat.

Jyn grew up in Baltimore, right on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay, but she has not been on many boats in her life. Lyra’s research was conducted exclusively on land, and Galen had never expressed much of an interest in recreational seafaring, and so Jyn’s exposure was limited to a ferry ride in the Mediterranean when she was eleven and a whale watching excursion in Hawaii when she was six.

She sits stiffly in the boat.

Chirrut seems to pick up on her anxiety, because he sits himself right next to her, and Baze squeezes in on her other side. Tuesso shoots them a look, but doesn’t comment. Bodhi looks a little green, and so everyone takes care to stay a safe distance away from him.

Cassian fires up the motor, and they leave Yavin.

This stretch of the Atlantic is unexpectedly smooth, and Jyn finds herself comforted by the sea spray that flies up into her face, splashing her cheeks with cold salt water. Chirrut smiles, and tips his head back.

“Do you hear that?” he asks.

“Hear what?”

Over her head flies a black and white bird, cawing softly, barely audible over the waves and the motor.

“An albatross,” Chirrut says.

“How did you hear it?” Jyn asks, stunned.

“I have excellent hearing, to make up for my lack of sight, I imagine,” Chirrut says. “It is not an accident I am a _linguistic_ anthropologist. I could hear it calling.”

“And you just recognized its call and knew it was an albatross? Without even seeing it?”

Chirrut’s smile falls.

“I used to know someone who greatly enjoyed birds,” he says, and his voice is very soft, and Jyn gets the sense she’s somehow overstepped her bounds. Baze has gone very still, and when she looks at him, his eyes are turned away, to the sea.

Chirrut sighs.

“The albatross,” he murmurs. “It’s calling to us. It’s wondering who we are.”

“You speak albatross, too?” Baze asks, more amused than annoyed, though the melancholy has not entirely vanished from his voice.

Chirrut’s smile returns, but it’s small. “I am sure the albatross is not the only one wondering who we are.”

Baze has no response to that.

Jyn watches the bird fly away, disappearing over the sea.

 

* * *

 

Unlike the beach of Yavin, which was rocky with stones, the beach of Scarif is all clean white sand.

Cassian steers them to the shoreline, and no one speaks.

There’s already a boat tethered on the shore.

It’s a boat identical to theirs, save that it is completely empty.

The six of them clamber out of their boat. Jyn’s boots sink into the thick white sand, and she throws her heavy backpack over her shoulders. In front of her, Bodhi does the same, all while keeping one eye on the other boat, about ten yards away.

Cassian looks at it, then turns to the team. “Stay here.”

He tosses his backpack on the beach, and walks to the boat, Tuesso at his heels. Both men are carrying heavy rifles of some kind, and Bodhi takes a step back as they pass.

Jyn watches as Cassian and Tuesso get into the boat. They go through it, searching the seats and the storage bins, looking over the engine and navigational system. From Jyn’s vantage point on the beach, the boat looks pretty obviously empty.

Next to her, Baze abruptly takes his own backpack off, along with his own heavy rifle.

“Baze?” Bodhi asks, frowning.

“It’s humid,” Baze replies, scowling. He pulls his tan leather jacket off his shoulders, tying it around his waist. Like Jyn (and she’s suspecting the rest as well) he’s got a black tank on. A tattoo decorates the left side of his chest, near his heart.

“Nice ink,” Jyn says.

Baze grins. “Thanks. It was to commemorate the nickname my battalion had for me.”

“They called you… Wolf?” Bodhi guesses, studying the tattoo, craning his neck for a better look.

Chirrut snorts, rolling up his sleeves to cool off a little, and Jyn mirrors him. Bodhi only wraps his arms around his chest, keeping his arms covered.

“Close, Bodhi,” Chirrut says. “Bear.”

“Baze ‘Bear’ Malbus,” Baze confirms.

“Hell of a name,” Jyn says with a smile. She can definitely picture how Baze as a young soldier, with all his muscle now and all the muscle he undoubtedly had then, earned the nickname of _Bear._

She steps closer, and sees it is indeed a bear on his chest. Sharp black lines and angles, its mouth open in a roar, eyes shaped like triangles looking up at her, claws stretched like blades.

“Yours is much more badass than mine,” she comments.

“What do you have?” Baze asks.

She reaches back to pat her covered left shoulder blade. “Stars.”

“That’s nice,” Bodhi says.

It is, she thinks. She got the tattoo when she was eighteen, finally realizing the idea she had when she was thirteen, and her mother died.

The tattoo is of the constellation Lyra.

The stars have been fancied up, inked in vivid colors, blues and purples scattered over her left shoulder blade, on her back. She’s gotten compliments on it, people admiring the vivid colors, the simple beauty of the tattoo, and she loves it, considers it to be one of the best things she’s ever gotten for herself.

Lyra would have been touched, she thinks, though alarmed that Jyn would do such a permanent thing to her body.

Cassian and Tuesso rejoin the team on the beach.

“Nothing there,” Cassian says. His face is tense, eyes wide, mouth a hard line. He looks weirdly stressed, Jyn thinks, considering they haven’t even gone into the Shimmer yet. Tuesso, at his side, is just as blank-faced as he was when Jyn first met him.

“No sign of… What might have happened?” Bodhi asks.

“Nothing.”

Cassian stands there, hands at his hips, and stares at the sea. Jyn watches him, studying his rigid posture, stiff back.

She feels like she might be missing something.

“So… That’s it.”

The words come from Tuesso. Tuesso is at least a good head taller than everyone, and he’s currently facing the Shimmer, a thing that is only about thirty yards away. The Shimmer doesn’t look any more natural or possible up close; it’s still a kind of wall, twisting and shining, purple and green and blue and yellow. There are shapes in its design, though she can’t place any of them.

Jyn recognizes no trace of her father’s hand in the thing.

The Shimmer is entirely silent, and it makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

“Inviting,” Baze grunts.

“What does it look like?” Chirrut asks.

“Like something from a dream,” Jyn says, and the team looks at her. “Or a nightmare.”

“Nightmare, most likely,” Tuesso decides.

Cassian squares his shoulders, and retrieves his pack from the sand.

“Okay,” he says. “I go first. Kay, you’re last. Everyone else; keep your eyes peeled, and watch your step. If you see anything that could be a threat, anything potentially toxic, anything that could be used as a weapon, you say something. Even if you aren’t sure; say something. And that includes any evidence of the first team. Got it?”

The team nods, a couple of _Yes sirs_ drifting over the sand.

Cassian nods. “Good.”

He surveys them all, studying their faces. His eyes fall on Jyn last.

Cassian has shown emotion before, in a way that Tuesso very clearly has not, beyond derision in his tone. But Cassian’s emotion had been subtle, composed, hinted with widened eyes or a thin smile. Here and now, his brown eyes are very big, very tense. She doesn’t think he’s scared.

But, perhaps; desperate.

She thinks of her father’s weapon, of the images of the lost NiJedha she has not been allowed to see.

There is so much to lose here.

Cassian turns away, and begins to walk to the Shimmer.

The rest of them follow, and Jyn can see Bodhi’s stiff form next to her, the way he’s clenching his hands into fists at his sides. She can hear Chirrut and Baze murmuring to each other behind her. Tuesso is entirely silent, though she does not doubt he’s following, bringing up the rear, as Cassian had told him to.

Tuesso may not have a lot of patience for her, but it’s obvious he respects Cassian, and that will be enough.

Cassian reaches the edge of the Shimmer and doesn’t hesitate. He walks in.

It’s strange, because she can still see him, blurred behind the glittering wall, purples and blues warping his head, tainting his brown skin, making him alien. He doesn’t react to the Shimmer at all; only walks forward.

She follows him in.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here we goooooo! into the Shimmer. this chapter actually covers or hints at least one reason as to why each team member is going into the Shimmer. some of these motives are more obvious than others, but they are all here in some form.
> 
> Albatross: a very large oceanic bird, and/or: a source of frustration or guilt.
> 
> depending on your version, that THE BELL JAR quote can be "bray" or "brag". for the purposes of this story, I have used "bray". fits better.
> 
> if you have not seen ANNIHILATION: the tattoos are very important.


	4. The Shimmer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “That’s not possible.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: mention of self-harm

* * *

  

_Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice._

\--Louise Glück, from _The Wild Iris_

 

* * *

 

“It’s so good to see you.”

Her father’s eyes are soft, warm, and he’s practically half-sprawled on top of the little table between them, in an effort to look at Jyn more closely. She sits stiffly, carefully stirring her cup of tea to perfection, eyes locked on the motions of the water.

“You, too, Papa,” she says.

“How have you been?”

She shrugs. “Fine. I’m at Stanford for grad school, I don’t know if Saw mentioned it--”

 _“No!”_ His eyes practically bug out, widening with delight. “I didn’t know. Jyn, that’s wonderful. Your mother would be so proud.”

Jyn nods. She knows she would be.

“How about you, Papa? What are you doing these days?”

“Oh, this and that,” he says, looking away from her for the first time to survey his own barely-touched cup of tea. He wraps his hands around it, and she notices how he’s shaking. “You don’t really need to know about my work, Stardust.”

She wonders if he might only be using that nickname, that most beloved nickname, the nickname that holds so many fond emotions for her, to detract from the blunt hurt caused by his other words. She stills. The anger, her anger, her closest friend, the emotion that is more of a father than her own father, washes over her.

“Then I guess you don’t need to know about mine,” she snaps.

Galen’s expression turns stricken.

“Stardust,” he says, again, and her anger spikes.

“Say my name.”

“What--”

 _“My name,”_ Jyn snaps. “You are… You can only call me that when you’re trying to be my father. When you actively _are being_ my father. And you have not done that in a long time. You abdicated your role. I think you did when Mama died.”

Her father’s eyes are impossibly huge, shock thick.

“Jyn…”

“And I know I share blame for that,” she continues. “I know I… I know what happened, with Mama, and I…”

She sighs.

“I don’t know,” she murmurs. “Maybe we just can’t do this. This father-daughter thing. Maybe it’s been too long. Maybe we aren’t meant for it. You aren’t a good father, and I’m not a good daughter.”

He sighs, very deeply, and stretches a hand over the table, reaching for hers.

She pulls away.

Galen looks at her.

“Everything I do, I do--”

“To protect me,” Jyn finishes. “Yeah. I know.”

“Do you?”

She meets his eyes.

There is regret, she thinks. Longing. Despair.

And, of course: a hint of hope.

She could be kind. She could be forgiving. She could be a good person. She could be a loving daughter.

But she doesn’t want to be. She doesn’t see a reason to be.

The facts remain.

She is not enough. He will leave. It will take years before they speak again.

He will drown in his guilt, and if she does too, well. She can take care of herself. She had to learn how to long ago.

She gets to her feet.

“Goodbye, Papa.”

 

* * *

 

She opens her eyes.

The sky is bright orange.

Jyn frowns.

She blinks, and finally understands it is not the sky that is orange, but the tent over her head.

_Tent._

She moves more quickly than she normally would in the morning, scrambling up. She’s wearing her black tank, cargo pants, and socks, but her boots are off, waiting for her at the tent flap. She shoves her feet into them, tying the laces messily, and unzips the door.

She clambers out.

Sunlight filters through the thick canopy overhead, made from oak and cypress trees growing close together, branches tangling and clutching. Abundant green grass gets flattened under her boots as she steps, and she stares around in bewilderment at the thick forest around her. The sunlight is oddly fuzzy, almost like a mirage, and so she lifts her arm, allowing the sun to soak her bare skin, studying the way the light refracts, colors of orange, yellow, red, and blue.

She startles at the sight of her left forearm.

The skin is mottled, bruised, bumpy to the touch. She runs her fingers over it. It looks like an allergic reaction, but Jyn has been tested for allergies, and learned she was only allergic to kiwis. And even then, her reactions have not made her skin look this angry.

She looks back up, at the foliage around her, and turns in a slow circle. The beach is nowhere in sight.

“What the hell,” she breathes.

She walks, following the sound of low voices.

Through a break between waist-high grass, she finds a clearing. Cassian and Baze are standing over a burned out firepit, a pile of rations at their feet. A short distance away, Bodhi and Chirrut are crouched down, flicking the switches of electronic equipment. Tuesso is nowhere in sight, though she can see five tents scattered around the area, peeking at her through trees.

Baze glances up. “Good morning.”

“You’re finally awake,” Cassian snaps, and his voice is tenser than she’s ever heard it.

“Sorry,” Jyn says. “I’m, uh, a little disoriented. Give me a minute.”

“You don’t remember setting up camp, do you?”

The quiet question comes from Bodhi. Dark bags are under his eyes, and his hands are trembling slightly. At his side, Chirrut looks incredibly serious, mouth thin.

“N-No,” Jyn says. “I… The last thing I remember is walking into the Shimmer.”

Awake, that is. She still remembers her dream, that memory of her father.

The last time she saw him, ten years earlier.

She pushes it away.

“That’s all the rest of us remember,” Cassian growls. “None of us remember reaching this forest, or pitching the tents. But we’ve done an inventory of our rations, and it looks like we’ve been out here for twenty-six hours.”

Jyn’s heart stops. “That’s not possible.”

“It gets stranger,” Chirrut says. He taps the radio at his feet. “None of our equipment is working properly. The satellite phone has no signal, and the GPS cannot locate us. Even though we’ve got at least twenty satellites over us right now. Everything can turn on, I can hear something from the radios, but nothing can perform its intended function.”

“And, look,” Bodhi says, getting to his feet and joining Jyn, Cassian, and Baze. He tugs a compass out of his pocket, and flicks it open.

The needle is spinning wildly.

“It’s like something electromagnetic is targeting our equipment,” Bodhi explains. “But to do this, it’d have to be…”

“What?” Cassian snaps.

“Massive,” Bodhi says. “Impossible.”

“There’s a lot of that going around,” Jyn mumbles.

Cassian runs a hand over his beard. She notices the silver dog tags hanging from his neck are stained with mud, and glances down at herself; the hem of her pants are also mud-splattered.

_What the hell._

“Okay,” Cassian breathes. “Here’s what we’re doing. We’ll pack up camp and head out.”

“How do we know which way is the fortress?” Jyn asks.

They’d entered Scarif from the north side, with the goal of walking a direct line south, to where the fortress theoretically was located.

Baze straightens, adjusting his wrist watch.

“Take your watch,” he says. “Point the hour hand at the sun.” He does so. “Split the difference between the hour hand and twelve.”

He points into the forest.

“South.”

“Impressive.”

It’s Tuesso, emerging from a thicket. Unlike the others, who are all noticeably unnerved, Tuesso looks just as composed and emotionless as always. His clothes are still neat and clean.

“We weren’t really expecting our equipment to work, were we?” Tuesso asks, stopping near Chirrut. Chirrut doesn’t react; his sightless eyes are trained on the ground, hands clasped together in thought. Or maybe prayer. “Considering the first team never sent us anything.”

He looks up at Cassian as he speaks, and there’s a hint of sympathy in his eyes.

Cassian stares right back.

Jyn frowns, looking between the two men.

Cassian clears his throat.

“Right, Kay,” he murmurs. “As I said; pack up, and we’ll head out. It’s already ten o’clock. We can’t lose any more of the day.”

 

* * *

 

They walk through the Shimmer.

Scarif, Jyn thinks, is beautiful. The plant life is thick and untouched, startlingly diverse and wild, a botanist’s dream. She fights the urge to take her own samples as she walks, intrigued at it all and eager to study everything she sees. They have not directly encountered any life beyond the flora, but the whole team is keeping their eyes peeled. It’s obvious there _are_ animals on Scarif; the bird calls have been almost incessant.

If Chirrut recognizes what kind of birds he’s hearing, he doesn’t share. He’s keeping pace with the rest of the team, using a long walking stick to sweep his way forward, and Jyn expects that might be taking all of his focus.

Though it might be difficult to hear the birds anyway; Baze and Tuesso have been arguing, going over theories of how the entire team could have forgotten the last twenty-six hours.

Jyn walks more quickly, catching up to Cassian, to drown out their bickering.

“So,” she says, to Cassian’s back, searching for an icebreaker. “When did you move to the States?”

He slows, turning his head to look at her.

“Are you asking to see my papers?”

 _“No,”_ Jyn says, flushing a little. Cassian’s accent is obviously Mexican, but there’s been no reason to comment on it. “I’m an immigrant, too, obviously--”

“I bet your birthplace earns you far less suspicion than mine does.”

She sighs. “You’re right.”

“I know I am.” He seems to take pity on her awkward conversation starter, and adds, “My father was American. A Vietnam vet. When he got sent home, he used his fluency in Spanish and university degree to land a job at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. He met my mother while he was hiking in the Sierra Madre Occidental. She was from a small town called Fest in one of the highest, coldest parts of the range. So when the charming American asked her to marry him, and to move to the capital, she said yes.” He pauses, and adds, “She died when I was eight. He got approved for a transfer, moved us to the States after that.”

“I’m sorry,” Jyn murmurs. “About your mother, I mean. I can relate.”

Cassian glances at her, and nods. “I know, Jyn.”

She had almost forgotten that Cassian likely knows her entire life story, based off the research Mothma and Draven undoubtedly had done on her, as Galen Erso’s only child.

The ground under them changes, leaving the forest to something approaching marshland.

“I could never pick up an American accent,” Cassian says. “I’m not sure I want to. I’m a U.S. citizen, I went to West Point, but…” He shrugs. “I am who I am.”

“I could never pick up an American accent either.”

He looks at her, a smirk drawn on his face. “Our accents are perceived very differently.”

“You’re right,” Jyn repeats.

“I know I am,” he repeats, and Jyn laughs, and he smiles.

“Your father must have been very proud of you, Cassian,” she says. “West Point. Army Intelligence.”

Cassian nods. “He was. But he practically raised us to go into the Military like he did. Our mother dying, allowing him to relocate us to the States; it set the wheels in motion.”

Jyn frowns, about to ask about that _us_ and _our,_ but Cassian isn’t done.

“I imagine your father is also very proud of you,” he says. “To go into STEM like he did. To be as accomplished as you are. You’re young to be a professor at such a well-regarded university.”

“I’ve been lucky,” Jyn says, and at Cassian’s inquiring look, she adds, “My accent makes people think I’m far smarter than I am. Don’t let the Americans in on my con.”

That earns her a light laugh, and she grins. Cassian opens his mouth, to say something else, but a loud _splash_ from behind them interrupts him.

They both turn on the spot, Cassian lifting his rifle--

But it’s only Baze, struggling out of a camouflaged hole in the ground, water up to his waist. He tosses his rifle at Tuesso, who catches it easily.

“Fuck this place,” Baze says, letting Chirrut pull him up. Chirrut has a very amused look on his face, and Jyn glances down at his cane, safely brushing the sides of the hole. “If this is what we’ve gone through, no wonder we don’t remember anything. Who would want to remember this?”

 

* * *

 

They walk for another half an hour, until Cassian abruptly stills, nearly causing Jyn to run into him.

“Up ahead,” he calls.

Jyn peers around Cassian.

The marsh has given way to a true swamp, about two hundred meters wide, the surface a glossy green, reflecting the trees bent over it in places. The water is mostly still, save for the flies buzzing over it, an occasional frog hiccuping from a glen of reeds on the shoreline.

Perched on the side of the swamp is a cabin.

The cabin looks to be made of wood painted white, a short dock leading from the swamp’s edge to the front door. It would be a normal, albeit rundown, cabin, save for the flowers.

The cabin is _covered_ in flowers, a bonafide carpet of them, trailing from the dock to the walls of the cabin, covering patches of the structure completely, like an encroaching wave. The flowers are in every color and size, roses and lilies and tulips and gladioli, and Jyn is moving before she’s even had the thought to do so.

Cassian grabs her arm. “Wait.”

“The _flowers,_ Cassian--”

“I go first,” he hisses, and she backs down.

She’d forgotten the dangers the Shimmer is meant to present.

She follows Cassian along the edge of the swamp, past a small shed filled with canoes, which easily seizes Baze’s attention. He stops, and moves over to the shed, rifle poised, Chirrut shadowing him. Bodhi and Tuesso leave them to their exploring, following Jyn and Cassian onto the dock.

The single railing of the dock is also covered in vivid flora, and Jyn drops to her knees to run her fingers over the flowers and plants.

“These are extremely strange,” she murmurs.

Tuesso pokes at a string of orchids, while Cassian and Bodhi go inside the cabin. “How so?”

Jyn gently pulls a poppy from the board closest to her feet. The poppy is a vivid orange, but speckled with the kind of marks she’s only ever seen on foxglove. She looks down, picking at the stem, and sees a purple foxglove-looking flower growing from the same stem, its insides marked black, like on poppies.

“To look at them… They don’t even look like the same species,” she breathes.

“Okay,” Tuesso says.

“But they’re…” Jyn tugs back a crown of irises, revealing the single thick vine wrapped around the railing, flowers of all kinds and brilliant colors protruding from the stems. “They’re all growing from the same branch structure. So not only are they… The same _species,_ they’re the same _plant._ But they can’t be… Look, this is a rose, but its… Its petals are warped, long and thin, and it’s growing _with_ a calla lily, and this _cannot_ exist.”

Tuesso studies the flowers with more interest. “But it does.”

“But it _can’t.”_

She fishes a couple clear plastic bags from her pants pocket, and carefully places the flowers separately in them, to study later.

Cassian steps out of the cabin.

“Anything?” Tuesso asks.

“Empty,” Cassian says. “And half-submerged into the swamp. Everything’s flooded and moldy. If there was ever anything in there, it’s gone now.”

Bodhi follows Cassian out, pausing in the open doorway to survey the wisteria climbing the wall.

“Huh,” he says, “Jyn, does this--”

He breaks off, as he’s suddenly _yanked_ back into the cabin.

“Bodhi!” Jyn screams, and she and Cassian are running into the cabin.

It is half-submerged, as Cassian said, a sharp incline swallowing half the building into the swampwater. Amidst the muddy gray water is Bodhi, up to his neck, spluttering and struggling. Jyn wastes no time in diving into the water, reaching for him, her feet slipping on the submerged floor of the cabin.

 _“Something’s got my pack!”_ Bodhi shouts. Jyn grabs his arm, and loses her breath at the sight of a thick, scaly black tentacle already wrapped around it.

Cassian is in the water too. She sees a flash of silver, and watches Cassian neatly cut a tentacle wrapped around Bodhi’s chest.

Something _screams._

The sound echoes around the walls, around the water itself. The cabin shakes.

“Drop the pack,” Cassian yells, and Bodhi fumbles at the straps around his shoulders, and Jyn moves to help him. A tentacle darts through the water and seizes her wrist, and she can’t swallow her shriek of pure terror.

But Tuesso is there, with his own knife, and he slices the tentacle and grabs her around the arms, hauling her up.

Another _scream_ shatters the air.

Everything quakes.

“Come on, come on--”

The four of them manage to drag themselves out of the muddy swamp. Safe on the above water side of the cabin, Jyn turns around, in time to watch a few thick tentacles grip the pack, and drag it under. The water ripples for a few moments, before becoming still again.

“Out,” Cassian shouts, and Jyn lets Tuesso drag her out of the cabin, down the dock, and back to the marsh land. Chirrut and Baze are standing and watching, Baze with his rifle pointed at the cabin behind them.

“Bodhi,” Chirrut breathes, and Jyn turns.

Bodhi is shaking, sobbing, and Cassian gently lowers him to the marsh before getting back to his feet, and turning to survey the swamp. Jyn drops to her knees next to Bodhi, her stomach rolling at the slime covering his jacket.

“Let’s get this off,” she says, and Chirrut nods, and helps her guide Bodhi’s jacket off his shivering form.

Bodhi looks unharmed, though he is still trembling violently. Jyn quickly runs her gaze over him, going from his neck down, but she freezes when she looks at his forearms.

They’re covered in long, thin scars; some look quite old, while others are fairly new.

Jyn is not a medical doctor.

But she knows what self-harm scars look like.

Bodhi is too lost in shock to see the way Jyn’s eyes have widened. She looks at Chirrut instead, whose fingers are gently wrapped around Bodhi’s wrist, undoubtedly feeling the razor cuts under his fingers. He shakes his head.

“Jyn,” Bodhi whispers.

“Yeah, Bodhi?”

His eyes are unfocused, but he’s looking at her chest, and Jyn follows his gaze. Her kyber crystal has fallen out of her wet shirt, shimmering in the refracted sunlight.

“That’s a kyber crystal,” Bodhi mumbles.

A loud _splash_ makes them look around.

The swamp water is disturbed again, starting from the cabin, and spiraling outward. As Jyn watches, the ripples move, carving a clear path from the back of the cabin to the shoreline the team is currently standing by.

“Get back,” Cassian snarls, and Jyn and Chirrut each grab an arm, and pull Bodhi toward the canoe shed. Tuesso and Baze cock their rifles, fanning out, as the ripples approach the shore.

Two massive, black tentacles shoot out of the water, and grip the edge of the marsh.

Jyn’s scream cannot escape her throat.

It’s an octopus, absolutely massive, far bigger than any she’s ever seen or read about. Bilaterally symmetric, with two eyes flickering in shades of red and yellow, and six flailing arms, littered with suckers. Two arms have been cut, and an inky blood is dripping from them.

It makes no noise, save for a stomach-turning _gloomp_ as its arms rove the marsh.

Jyn pulls her handgun from its holster.

Baze and Tuesso immediately begin to fire, and she joins them.

The octopus twitches as the bullets rain down on it, and it twists, turning its body away, re-molding its shape. It begins to crawl to Baze, who moves backwards, away from the reaching arms. Baze’s face is hard, and determined, but he’s running out of room; he’ll back into the trunk of a willow in ten feet.

Cassian begins firing from the reeds.

The octopus changes course, moving towards him instead, but Cassian doesn’t back down. Instead, he drops to a knee, firing incessantly at the octopus as it crawls towards him. The creature makes it another five feet before it finally falls.

One of its arms brushes the toe of Cassian’s boot.

He lowers the rifle, exhaling.

Tuesso comes running up. Carefully, he pokes the octopus’ head.

It doesn’t move.

“Dead?” Cassian asks.

“Dead.”

Leaving Bodhi with Chirrut, Jyn and Baze approach the men and the octopus.

“I don’t know much about… octopuses,” Baze begins. “But should this be here?”

“I think they live in every ocean,” Jyn comments, bending to get a closer look. The octopus’ skin is jet black, and she touches it. Slimy, and freezing cold. “But it seems strange to encounter one so close to shore like this. In an island.”

“Not to mention a freshwater swamp.”

Jyn looks up at Tuesso. “Sorry?”

“Octopus do not live in freshwater,” Tuesso says. “No species are known to.”

“So, what,” Cassian asks, eyeing the octopus. “Is this a new species?”

“I don’t know _what_ it is,” Jyn murmurs.

Up close, the octopus is even more massive than it had appeared in the water. It looks to be about twenty meters long, with a mantle length of four meters. It could swallow any of them up without a problem. Jyn pushes against the mantle, and realizes it’s rock hard.

“It shouldn’t be hard like this,” she whispers. “Baze, can you lift the arms here?”

Baze does so, revealing the mouth. Rather than a single beak are two rows of sharp, jagged teeth in varying sizes.

“I did not think octopuses had teeth,” Baze comments.

Jyn swallows. “They don’t. These, uh. They kind of look like shark teeth.”

Cassian stares. “Can it be a cross-breed?”

“You can’t cross-breed across different species,” Jyn says. “Their genes are too different.”

“So, like the flowers,” Tuesso summarizes.

“This can’t be real,” Jyn says, shaking her head. “The flowers were weird enough, but this…”

“It’s big for an octopus,” Baze comments.

“Too big for a shark, too,” Tuesso says.

“What about a giant squid?”

Jyn shakes her head again. “Squids have two tentacles designed to capture prey. This octopus has eight arms; no special tentacles. Not to mention the difference in the shape of their mantles…”

She trails off. Nothing is becoming clearer.

“Well.” Tuesso straightens, and Baze lets the arms of the octopus drop. “I say we get out of here.”

“Agreed,” Jyn says.

Cassian nods. “I know it… Might sound counterintuitive, but we should take the canoes. Go through the water. It heads south away from here. Would probably be quicker.”

“You’re the lead,” Tuesso says.

Jyn gets to her feet.

They return to Chirrut and Bodhi in the shed. Baze immediately goes to pull the canoes out of the shed, and Chirrut and Tuesso help him. Cassian looks at the still-shivering Bodhi, wearing only his black tank, his scarred arms bumpy with goosebumps, and pauses. Cassian pulls off his jacket, and then his outershirt, which he hands to Bodhi.

“Here,” he says.

“T-Thanks,” Bodhi stutters, pulling the shirt over his head, his soaked hair.

Cassian straightens. On his back, above the right side of his black tank, Jyn sees a perfectly round, black circle, a little smaller than the size of her palm.

“Are you hurt?” she asks, alarmed.

“What?”

“Your shoulder,” she says, patting her own right shoulder blade.

His eyes clear. “Oh. It’s nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Very. It’s a tattoo, Jyn.”

“Oh.” She blinks. She has no idea why someone would get a tattoo of a filled-in, black circle, but it isn’t her place to ask. Baze has a tattoo commemorating his time in the military, and Jyn has a tattoo memorializing her mother, and Cassian doesn’t owe any of them an explanation or description.

Cassian pulls his jacket back on, gives her a last look, and walks to the shoreline.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the "someone falls into a hole, complains about remembering what happened" bit was taken from an earlier draft of ANNIHILATION.
> 
> the alligator in ANNIHILATION has been exchanged for an octopus, to mimic the Bor Gullet from ROGUE ONE. why is THE LAST JEDI the only new era STAR WARS movie to not feature a terrifying tentacle monster.
> 
> yes, after the Nonsense, it was weird to write Cassian's mother as being from Fest, and his father not from Fest. I think there was an actual reason for this in this story, but I can't remember right now. [ETA: it's because in canon Cassian's father was the rebel who likely got him into the war, duh]
> 
> tattoossssss
> 
> tomorrow is my first day at my new job; if you like this story, please send good vibes! and if you don't like this story; send good vibes anyway.


	5. Sharp Objects

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “For me, and you; it is grief.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: descriptions of gore, violence

* * *

 

_One day I will tell you what I’ve been._

_It will scare you._

\--Yrsa Daley-Ward, from _bone_

 

* * *

 

One canoe has a hole, one canoe is large, one canoe is medium-sized, one is quite small, and so they split up. Cassian, Baze, and Bodhi take the largest canoe, with Cassian and Baze paddling and Bodhi crouched in the belly of the boat, between their seats. He’s clearly cowering away from the water, but no one says anything about it. It’s more than merited.

Jyn and Chirrut take the medium canoe, while Tuesso fits his long arms and legs into the smallest one, bringing up the rear of their water convoy. Jyn studies Tuesso’s pinched face, and tells herself to remember how he did not hesitate to jump into the water in the cabin after her, to pull her out to safety.

As she paddles, she looks around.

Weeping willows line the shore of the water. Away from the cabin and the swamp, the water has darkened, become deeper and colder and blacker. Albino driftwood floats in the shallows, soft moss in shades of orange and teal waving under the surface. Bugs dance over the water, and Jyn watches a dragonfly, a sparkling emerald green, land at the top of the bow of the canoe before taking off again. A moment later, a deep ruby red dragonfly does the exact same thing.

Overhead, the sky is purple, green, yellow, blue, white.

And shimmering.

“This place,” she whispers.

“Describe it to me.”

Chirrut is behind her, paddling at her speed. She’d been unsure about him paddling, what with his lack of sight, but Chirrut had climbed in and picked up the paddle without any comment. He’s doing fine.

“I don’t know how,” she says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“And I’ve never seen anything.”

She snorts, and Chirrut smiles.

“Bodhi said you have a kyber crystal,” he says, and Jyn had certainly not been expecting that.

“I do.”

“Those are very rare,” Chirrut says. “The village I grew up in, back home in China, was near a mine; if you dug deep enough, you could find crystals, and we constantly had miners who were there for just that, coming from all around the world. They brought business to the village; but none of the villagers could afford a crystal. It was considered a treat to even _see_ one.” Chirrut shrugs. “It was the one thing having to do with sight that I had in common with all my friends.”

Jyn studies the dark water under the canoe, her and Chirrut’s hazy reflections peeking back.

“May I ask where you got your crystal, Jyn?”

“It was my mother’s,” Jyn says. “She and my father, they, uh… They didn’t do wedding rings. They did kyber crystal necklaces. When my mother died, he gave me hers. Thought their child should have it.”

“So now you match your father.”

“I guess,” Jyn says. “I dunno. I haven’t seen him in ten years.” She pauses, and adds, “He’s probably dead.”

She hasn’t seen a single sign or hint that Galen is here, in the Shimmer. That he ever _was_ here. Just like the first team.

Her heart twists.

She has to prepare herself for the worst.

It has always been inevitable for her, the worst.

“Ah,” Chirrut murmurs. “That’s it.”

“What’s it?”

“Do you remember what I said about carrying something into the Shimmer?”

_Vividly._ “Yes.”

“What I meant was no one just ups and chooses to walk into the Shimmer. Something chases us into it. It’s the same thing we all carry in.”

She twists her head around to look at him. “What do you mean?”

“For me, and you; it is grief.”

“... Still not quite following you.”

“Your dead mother, and your lost father,” Chirrut murmurs. “No family left. Bodhi, with his… His scars. His depression. That is also a form of grief, a most intimate one; the grief of a loss of self. As for me; it’s my daughter.”

“Your daughter,” Jyn repeats.

“Mm-hmm. Kira. My birdwatcher.” He smiles once, and then it disappears, quick as a hummingbird’s wings. “She was seven. A school friend’s mom was driving her daughter and Kira to ballet practice. A drunk driver rammed into them. Four o’clock in the afternoon on a Thursday. All killed on impact.”

“Oh, god, I’m so sorry.”

Chirrut nods. “Baze was the paramedic on call. He was in the first ambulance on the scene. He dragged our daughter’s body out of that car. I will spare you the details, but… It was not good. He was traumatized.” Chirrut pauses, and adds, “My husband has been sober for nine years. But he did not get sober until after a decade of alcoholism, following our daughter’s death.”

“Understandable,” Jyn breathes.

“Our marriage has survived, but…” Chirrut sighs. “The loss is still there. We grieved for a long time. Baze grieved by devoting himself not to our daughter, but to the drink, even as it made him a beast of a man. I grieved by memorizing the bird calls she was so fond of, and pretending I might be able to hear her in them.”

Jyn doesn’t know what to say.

“There was a lot to grieve,” Chirrut says. “So much loss. The loss of not only our daughter, but who we were when we had her. Fathers. Partners. Guardians. Now, we are… Well. We are still introducing the other to our new selves. It is a long process.”

She glances behind her, at Chirrut’s thoughtful face. Over his shoulder, she can see Tuesso paddling in his lone boat, ten yards back.

“So what about Agent Tuesso?” she wonders. “What brought him into the Shimmer?”

“He shows so little emotion, or reaction, I have no idea,” Chirrut says. “But perhaps he only walks into the Shimmer because he was ordered to. It might be enough of a reason, for such a person as him.”

But he wasn’t ordered to. She knows that, was told by Tuesso himself. He still chose to go.

They all did.

“And Captain Andor?”

“Ah.” Chirrut pauses, looks ahead. Jyn follows his gaze, her eyes catching on Cassian’s back at the front of the first canoe. “I don’t think so. I suspect he might be like you, Jyn. I think he has lost someone, and that loss has chased him into the Shimmer.”

She thinks of what Cassian has told her about his mother. “Even one that happened a long time ago?”

“No,” Chirrut says, and she glances at him in surprise. “No, this is recent. It is tearing him apart at the seams. He was so composed and quiet on Yavin. Here, he is… Shaky. Unnerved.”

“We all are.”

“I expect it takes a lot more to rattle someone like the Captain. His desperation is quiet, but it is there. Screaming silently.”

Jyn had thought Cassian to appear _desperate_ earlier.

“Sometimes, the pain of the loss… It just makes me want to _scream,”_ Chirrut says. “It feels like the only way to let it out is by screaming. To hold it in is too much. It changes me.”

Chirrut’s paddle dips into the water, and a couple dragonflies buzz around it, a swirl of color, muted by their rapid movements.

“Grief, and loss, and trauma,” he murmurs. “It warps the edges of our very individual realities.”

 

* * *

 

The water leads into a sort of canyon, hills on both sides, and so they disembark the canoes before the water narrows too much for them to get through. They climb the hillside, strangely bereft of rocks but densely packed with moss as soft as a baby’s hair. Jyn snags a couple handfuls as she climbs.

They crest the hill.

Before them is a collection of buildings.

Only a couple are large; most are small, hut-like, all smooth gray stone. A chain-link fence runs around them, squat guard booths littered every fifty meters or so. A guard tower stands alone, a few stories higher than all the other buildings. Yet the Shimmer has had an affect on the infrastructure; like the cabin in the swamp, all the buildings have been attacked by encroaching flora, more flowers and vines wrapped around the edges of all, the edges of everything.

“It’s a base,” Cassian says.

“Sorry?” Bodhi asks.

“It looks like a base,” Cassian says. “A place of operations. If I had to guess; I’d say this is where the Empire kept its workers, when they were building the fortress, and the Shimmer.”

A light rain begins to fall.

Jyn, whose clothes are still a little wet from running into the water after Bodhi, can’t prevent her shiver.

“It’ll make a good shelter,” Tuesso says.

Cassian nods. “Agreed. It might be the safest place on the island, if this is where the Empire worked. We should stay here for the night.”

They walk into the base, heading towards the largest of the buildings. The south side of the building has been covered in aggressively-grown flowers, and Jyn stops to look at them, Chirrut shadowing her. Chirrut brushes his fingers over the petals, while Jyn frowns, studying the patterns. Her attention catches on a long, thin patch of what looks like pale yeast that dominates the surface of the building. It almost appears to be breathing, but she knows it’s a trick of her tired eyes.

It must be.

“More mutations,” she murmurs.

“They’re like tumors.”

She turns. It’s Tuesso. He’s staring hard at the flower wall, the flowers arching away and seemingly consuming the stone; his jaw is set.

“Malignant,” he clarifies. “Consuming everything they touch. Changing it. Tumors.”

Jyn nods. “I think you’re right.”

Tuesso turns away.

Cassian clears his throat.

“Let’s go inside.”

 

* * *

 

The building is airy, windows broken by invading vines, and their steps echo loudly as they walk the tiled halls. Signs point them towards the airfield, towards the medical office, towards the mess hall, and towards the barracks. It is this last sign they follow, emerging into a large open space littered with a handful of narrow beds.

And scattered around the floor: packs exactly like the ones each team member carries.

“Oh, shit,” Bodhi breathes.

Baze, near Cassian, turns around to look at Tuesso. “The first team?”

Tuesso nods, startled silent.

Cassian moves into the room.

He abandons his own pack on the floor, crossing the space to go over the packs similarly abandoned near the beds. He crouches down, flicking them open, going through their contents. Bodhi jogs over to join him, with Tuesso following, expression alarmingly stricken.

“Cassian, it may--”

“Help me look,” Cassian snarls, and he sounds angrier than Jyn has ever heard him.

She turns away.

Baze is studying a small assortment of guns. They’re all rifles, like the ones he, Cassian, and Tuesso carry. Some are missing entire clips, while others have been partially deconstructed.

Jyn’s attention catches on a large whiteboard, alone before a line of broken windows.

She goes to it.

It’s a crudely drawn map of the base, she thinks, going by the shape of the buildings and dotted line surrounding them all. Someone has labeled the buildings in shorthand, and drawn little paths between and around them.

A graph next to the map lists a series of surnames:

_Pao_

_Melshi_

_Sefla_

_Basteren_

_Tonc_

It is the last surname that makes her freeze.

_Andor._

“Cassian,” she says. When there is no response, she yells, “Cassian!”

“What?”

She turns. Cassian is looking at her, face tight, still crouched over the packs. Bodhi has laid out rations on the floor, while Tuesso is digging through another pack.

Jyn holds Cassian’s eyes. “You aren’t the first Andor on Scarif.”

He swallows.

“I know.”

She stares.

“I have something.”

They turn around. Baze is on the other side of the room, looking down at a single folded table. He picks up a clear, zipped bag, turning to shake it at them; something small and dark is in it. He’s looking down at a piece of paper in his hand.

“For those that follow,” he reads.

Bodhi darts to his side, taking the bag. “It’s a memory chip. Hey, I think I’ve got a camera this will work with.”

They gather around Bodhi, who inserts the chip into his video camera.

The screen fizzes for a moment, and then begins to play.

A close-up of a pale man with rosy cheeks. His hair is sweat-soaked, eyes wild, and he’s sitting awkwardly against a wall, shirtless, handcuffed to a chair. The camera gets close into his face. He blinks dilated brown eyes.

“Melshi,” Cassian whispers.

The camera zooms back. The room is a large kitchen, pots and pans hanging from the ceiling. There’s two other men crouched next to him. They seem to be murmuring something to him, perhaps words of comfort, but Melshi shakes his head.

“I’m fine,” the man mumbles. “There’s nothing wrong with me. Nothing wrong with me, nothing nothing--”

“Look, look.”

It’s a woman’s voice, and the camera leans back a little as the woman peers into it. She’s middle-aged, with warm brown skin, a wide mouth, prominent cheekbones, and a thin nose. Her hair is wildly curly and dark, falling into her bloodshot brown eyes. Dog tags slide out from under her tan shirt.

In front of Jyn, Tuesso grips Cassian’s shoulder.

“Things are getting freaky,” the woman says, in an accent matching Cassian’s. “We don’t know what day it is, or where we are on the island. And we are… We are experiencing things--”

Melshi emits a soft cry, and the woman turns to look at him, her hair sliding off her neck to reveal a solid black sun with wide rays inked at the top of her spine.

“Nerezza, _please, don’t--”_

“Sssh, ssh,” the woman murmurs. “It’s almost time to rest, Melshi. Almost time to go home. Almost time. We can still be forgiven.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me, nothing wrong, I’m fine, I’m fine, _Jesus Christ--”_

She turns back to the camera. _“Look.”_

A long dagger. Melshi’s hands grip the chair tightly. The woman steps forward, and presses the blade to Melshi’s abdomen. She cuts.

Melshi screams.

_“Jesus fucking Christ, Andor!”_

Bodhi gags, Baze swears, and Tuesso gasps.

The woman cuts a jagged line over Melshi’s abdomen. The man continues to whimper and moan, his body shaking in the face of the woman’s unexpected violence. She does not say a word as she works, carving out the man’s skin like it’s nothing, even as dark red blood gushes out, dripping over the man’s stomach, over the woman’s free hand, to the floor.

Jyn doesn’t dare breathe.

The woman leans back into the camera. “See it?”

Jyn looks.

She’s cut away the man’s skin, revealing his internal organs. They are oddly unbloody, almost clean.

Jyn realizes she’s staring at the man’s intestines.

As she watches, they _move._

Curling and uncurling. Shifting and changing. Thick and swollen.

Like a snake.

Bodhi vomits.

The woman’s eyes are wild.

“This place is _death,”_ she says, staring directly into the camera. “Get out while you can. Do not come back. Forget the weapon. The Shimmer is going to take you apart. It won’t let you leave.”

She turns back to Melshi, to the organs undulating inside him, and lifts the dagger.

The camera turns down, focusing on a dirty tiled floor, blood staining a pair of dark boots.

Melshi screams.

_“No,_ Nerezza, Nerezza, please, god--”

His scream devolves into wordless pain.

“Turn it off,” Cassian says.

His voice is cold.

“Captain,” Baze begins, but Cassian grabs the camera, and throws it into the wall.

It shatters, the noise echoing over the silent space.

Without a word, Cassian leaves the room.

Jyn takes a step, but Tuesso seizes her arm. He shakes his head at her, and then leaves, following after Cassian.

“What was it?” Chirrut whispers.

“Be glad you could not see it,” Baze grunts. “It was torture.”

Bodhi is on his hands and knees, a small pile of vomit before him. He shifts up, wiping his hand over his mouth.

“D-Did you see that,” he stutters. “The way h-his… They were m-moving--”

“A trick of the light,” Baze insists.

Jyn stares. _“What?_ No, his intestines were changing--”

“Trauma does strange things to people,” Baze says, dismissively. “I’ve gone on calls where people have been horribly gored, disfigured. Yet they still walk, talk. _Move._ There is always a simple cause. What we saw there; it was like that. It was not… Whatever you think it was.”

“Oh, like _internal organs moving--”_

“I saw a U.S. Army soldier eviscerate a fellow soldier with a knife,” Baze snaps. “Even as he begged her not to. And then she murdered him. That is horrific enough. It was nothing more.”

Chirrut’s face is turned to the doorway Cassian and Tuesso have disappeared through.

“The Captain knows her,” he summarizes.

“They have the same eyes,” Jyn murmurs.

But she has never seen Cassian’s eyes wild and unhinged like that.

From the floor, Bodhi looks up at her.

“Do you think… Do you think that guy she cut up is still in the kitchen?”

 

* * *

 

He is.

Sort of.

Melshi is only vaguely recognizable as a person.

He’s still seated in the chair, pants-covered legs and boots touching the floor.

But he’s been dessicated. Vivisected.

His torso is a good four feet above his seated lower half, embedded into the wall. A new, unnatural decoration.

Flowers and moss explode from his chest, tying his ribs to the wall, inky flowers entwining around bone. His throat has been torn out, turning his vocal cords into sharp crystal-like rocks, shining in the dim light coming from the skylights in the ceiling, fanning around what remains of his head like a crude halo. His jaw is all skeleton, yanked open, teeth missing, a couple scattered on the floor, several lodged in the wall, a phantom constellation. The top half of his skull, almost swallowed by violets, is embedded at a point two feet above the rest of his face, contorting his mouth into a horrifying scream.

The man’s arms have sunk into the wall, the tile decorating the skin like a fleshy mosaic.

Brilliant white vines and stems spiral outward from the place where the man’s torso should have been, creating a vague flower shape, lines of red-like veins scratching the wall. Another ring of a yellower moss surrounds it, patterned geometrically, spiraling out almost like the rays of a distorted sun.

“Tumors,” Jyn whispers.

Bodhi wraps his arms around himself as Jyn approaches the body.

Baze, at her side, bends down and picks up the knife from the video, abandoned on the floor. Its blade is covered in dried blood, dark and flaky like rust.

She brushes the vine closest to her; it’s hard, a white wood, like a tree branch even though there is no evidence of any kind of tree among the flowers and leaves. She moves her fingers over it, touching one of the red vines. They’re wet.

She pulls her hand away.

Blood covers her fingertips.

Baze stretches above her, reaching into the man’s exposed rib cage and tugging something free.

He opens his palm. Dog tags.

“Ruescott Melshi,” he reads.

“That’s the guy,” Jyn nods.

Though she was quite sure it was him, the man’s face is all skeleton now. No trace of his hair or eyes or skin.

She looks up, at the only bits of skin visible, his hard arms. A black sun decorates his left bicep, identical to the sun tattoo on the back of Nerezza Andor’s neck.

“I don’t want to sleep here,” Bodhi whispers.

Chirrut speaks from the back of the room, away from the deformed body grown into the wall.

“We won’t make you,” he murmurs. “But this place is relatively well-sheltered. So perhaps we can sleep somewhere else nearby.”

“The guard tower,” Baze grunts. “Perhaps it will help us protect ourselves from… The madness down here.”

Bodhi looks unconvinced, but Chirrut steps closer to him, and wraps an arm around his shoulders. Bodhi leans into the touch.

Over Bodhi’s head, Chirrut meets Jyn’s eyes.

For the first time, she thinks she might envy his blindness.

 

* * *

 

They return to the barracks briefly to gather their packs, along with supplies pilfered from the abandoned packs from the first team. Though Jyn’s stomach had been rumbling during the canoe trip, she doesn’t go for any of the extra dried fruits now. She feels like her stomach might have vacated her body entirely, and might be halfway back to the mainland by now.

None of them speak.

No one dares comment on how while Melshi’s body has been discovered, the other five members of his team are still unaccounted for.

Including the body of his killer.

Tuesso meets them outside.

He’s got a hard, tight look on his face, and takes time to study them individually.

Jyn thinks she’s being analyzed.

She thinks Tuesso has never looked more like a robot.

“We found Melshi,” Baze says, before Tuesso can ask.

Tuesso nods once. “Any of the others?”

“No.”

He doesn’t look surprised.

Over Tuesso’s shoulder, in a field of wildflowers, sits Cassian. His back is to them, arms wrapped around his knees, body turned towards the thick forest leading south.

A soft wind blows over the field, and he doesn’t make a move.

“We were thinking of camping in the guard tower,” Chirrut says.

“That’s acceptable,” Tuesso says with a sharp nod. “The sun will set soon; let’s head up.”

Bodhi and Baze need no more suggestion. The two of them set off, boots squishing down grass and flowers with no hesitation or care. Chirrut trails more slowly, brushing his fingers over Jyn’s arm, in a gesture she is not sure how to interpret but gains comfort from anyway.

She waits until the others are out of hearing range before she speaks.

“How is he?”

Tuesso looks at her. “Not good.”

“She, uh… Nerezza. Andor. Sister?”

“Sister,” Tuesso confirms.

He suddenly steps closer to Jyn, staring down at her with dark eyes. She fights the urge to take a step back. Tuesso towers over her, but this is the first time he’s used his height to intimidate her.

“I know Nerezza Andor,” he hisses. “I grew up down the block from the Andors in D.C. Nerezza is lovely. Warm, and funny, and _kind._ What you saw in that video; that was not _her._ Don’t you dare think she is… that.”

“I don’t,” Jyn says.

“There is no one Nerezza loves more than her little brother,” Tuesso continues. “No one Cassian loves more than her. If I get even the _slightest_ suggestion you judge him for her… actions. For what you saw on that camera. If you say something _incorrect_ about Nerezza to him, make him doubt her, make him feel… _ashamed_ to be her brother… I will make you regret it. Believe me.”

She thinks that while it’s probably true there is no one Cassian Andor loves more than his big sister, that it’s also true there is no one Kay Tuesso loves more than Cassian Andor.

“Yes, sir,” Jyn says.

Tuesso’s eyes flicker over her face, searching for dishonesty, and finding none. “Good.”

She nods.

“I’ll help you carry some of the guns up to the tower,” he says, stepping back. “Let’s leave Cassian alone for now.”

Tuesso tosses the shoulder straps of several rifles Baze had already deemed safe and devoid of ammunition over his shoulder, and begins to walk across the field to the tower. Jyn can see the slightly-fuzzy shapes of Baze, Bodhi, and Chirrut already ascending the stairs.

She picks up the remaining rifles but pauses, looking over at Cassian one more time.

He hasn’t moved.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EZZA! if any of you guessed [one of the reasons] Cassian was going into the Shimmer was because he was looking for someone; you win! there were very tiny clues in his actions/reactions to events/what people said about them. Kay knew the whole time, obviously. but no one commented on this to me, or predicted it was Nerezza.
> 
> [for those unaware of the Long National Nightmare that is the Nonsense: Nerezza is a character from that universe, Cassian's older sister, borrowed for this one.]
> 
> Nerezza's "This place is death" line is lifted from LOST, a great influencer on all my writing, including the Nonsense.
> 
> my description of the skeleton on the wall is poor, so here is a link to a pic of it in ANNIHILATION, where the skeleton is at the bottom of a pool: https://goo.gl/images/QBbGxS .
> 
> really getting into it now...


	6. Malignant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Isn’t self-destruction coded into us? In our cells?”

* * *

 

_I said to the sun, “Tell me about the big bang.”_

_The sun said, “It hurts to become.”_

\--Andrea Gibson, from _I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power’s Out_

 

* * *

 

“Stardust,” he murmured to her, as the two of them stood at the security line at Dulles, and for the first time, her father’s nickname for her left her aching, not comforted. She was too hollowed out, by the loss of Lyra, the loss of Baltimore, the loss of it all. “My Stardust. Everything I do, I do to protect you. Do you understand?”

She didn’t meet his eyes, and she didn’t respond.

 

* * *

 

_Everything I do._

_Everything I do._

_Everything I do._

Anything _I do._

 

* * *

 

She opens her eyes.

The sky is solid.

Jyn frowns.

She blinks, and finally understands it is not the sky that is solid, but the roof over her head.

She sits up.

To her right, Baze and Chirrut are fast asleep, entwined together, sleeping bag-covered bodies pressed as close as can be. On their other side, under the window, is Bodhi, snoring softly, cocooned so tightly in his sleeping bag only the top of his head pokes out. Two sleeping bags across the room are empty, though the packs they came out of are still present.

Jyn gets to her feet.

She steps out of the tower room, standing at the railing wrapping around the structure. The sky overhead is shimmering, twisting, spazzing in odd places, and she makes a mental note that the Shimmer seems to extend to Scarif’s highest point, perhaps to create a dome-like structure. Through the haze is the night sky, cloudy and unknowable. The air is thin, heavy with uncertainty and a heady friction, like the air right before a most dangerous thunderstorm strikes.

Cassian is seated at the edge of the deck, arms wrapped around the lower rail of the railing, legs dangling over the edge.

Jyn goes to him.

“Can I join you?”

He doesn’t look at her. “Sure.”

She sits.

Below, she can see a single light, coming from the guard hut near the border the team had chosen to be their security point. She recognizes the silhouette of Tuesso, standing in the hut, reading some kind of document.

She turns away from the sight, to look at Cassian. “You okay?”

He sighs, very softly. “No.”

His eyes are turned up, towards the night sky, and so she turns her head, to follow his gaze.

“I have stars on my shoulder,” Jyn says, before she can stop herself.

She has no idea what else to say.

It seems to work; Cassian glances at her.

“My mother,” Jyn says. “Her name; it’s a constellation. Lyra. When I was eighteen, I got the constellation tattooed on my shoulder. I was really particular about it. The first tattoo artist I saw, he was kind of dismissive, tried to tell me I should get a bigger, fancier-looking constellation, or something. I went to a different artist after that. I think it turned out okay.”

She shuts her mouth, worried her rambling will only be annoying to him.

But after a moment, Cassian only gives a deep sigh. His shoulders drop.

“I have the phases of the moon,” he says. “Across my back. Right shoulder to left hip, in a diagonal line. You saw the full earlier.”

She nods, recalling the strange filled-in black circle on his shoulder.

A full moon.

“And my sister…” He swallows. “She had the sun, at different points in the day, in a line straight down her spine. Beginning with the full sun at the top of her spine. Dropping down into a half-sun, and then setting, and then rising, and returning to a full sun at her lower back.” He glances at Jyn. “Our mother called us her sun and moon. She said Ezza was the brightest thing she had ever seen in her life. And she said I glowed, out from under my skin. So. Sun and moon. Ezza waited until I was eighteen, and then we got our tattoos. Our mother had been dead for a decade. It felt like a nice way to honor how she saw us.”

“I’m sorry, Cassian.”

He looks at her.

“I know what that looked like… that video,” he says, softly. “I understand if you think of my sister, and feel disgust. But I want you to know that isn’t her. She isn’t like that. She is the best of the Army, and I mean… Not just the best soldier, but the best _person._ She is the best of us. And she is the best Andor. By far.”

“I believe you,” Jyn says. “And Agent Tuesso does too.”

Cassian smirks. “He has to. He worships the ground Nerezza walks on.” At Jyn’s inquiring gaze, he clarifies, “Nerezza is six years older than me, and Kay. Kay’s parents were never around much, and my father worked a lot when we lived in the States, and so Nerezza took care of both Kay and me. She practically raised us.”

“She did a good job.”

He laughs.

“Kay turned out alright,” Cassian murmurs. “But me…” He looks at Jyn, and she startles at the shadows that line his face, darkness peering out at her from his brown eyes. “I have been far closer to being the person who tears out the insides of others than my sister has ever been. And I need you to remember that, Jyn. I care if you think poorly of Nerezza, because I know how _good_ she is… But I care less if you think poorly of me, because I know how _bad_ I am. You just haven’t seen it yet.”

Jyn stares at him.

Cassian looks away, shaking back his sleeve to check his watch.

“You’re due to relieve Kay,” he murmurs. “But I’m already awake, so I can go.”

“No, let me,” Jyn says. “You should get some rest.”

“She’s right, Captain.”

They both jump.

Chirrut is standing in the open doorway, hands clasped over the top of his walking stick.

“Hello, Dr. Imwe,” Cassian says. “I forgot to thank you for helping Bodhi so much earlier. Is he alright?”

“I gave him a sedative I found in Agent Tuesso’s pack,” Chirrut says, unrepentant. Jyn feels a surge of sympathy for Bodhi. “He’ll sleep through the night. Much better than the rest of us, I expect. We’re all just as rattled as him. Perhaps only hiding it better.”

Jyn gets to her feet.

“I’m gonna head down,” she says. Cassian nods at her, before turning away, looking at the field below. Jyn steps past him.

She’s stopped by Chirrut, who reaches out, and wraps his hand around the kyber crystal on her chest.

“The strongest stars have hearts of kyber, Jyn,” he whispers.

Jyn stares.

Chirrut’s pale blue eyes seem to shine in the darkness.

He smiles.

“Good night, Doctor.”

He walks away from her, to sit with Cassian at the railing.

Jyn leaves.

 

* * *

 

Tuesso gives her a nod in greeting. She wasn’t really expecting anything warmer.

She was definitely not expecting Tuesso to beckon her into the booth.

“Take a look at this,” he says. “I found it in the medical office.”

The booth is windowless, open to the air, encircled on all sides by a wall rising to chest-height, entered by a swinging half-door. Jyn pulls the door open, stepping into the small space next to Tuesso. He smooths out the document he’d been looking at on the wall edge.

It’s a map.

Jyn recognizes the base by its shape, and the fact it’s been marked _HQ._ Lines, colors, and shapes have been used to draw out the rest of Scarif, and Jyn recognizes the shape of the water path they’d used to reach the base, along with the shape of the swamp, and the beach they’d landed on.

Tuesso points to a spot on the other side of the island, a pinnacle-shaped structure.

_The Citadel._

“The Citadel?” Jyn repeats.

“I think it’s what we’ve been referring to as a fortress,” Tuesso says. “It’s the only structure on this island that it could be. There’s the swamp cabin, and this base, which I believe was what we thought was the fortress we were seeking, and then a few other small groups of shelters scattered around. But this citadel; it’s one of a kind. If the data files are not stored here in this base, which we know they aren’t, then they are most likely stored--”

“In the Citadel,” Jyn finishes. “Yeah.”

But she frowns, studying the map.

“This says the Citadel is next to a beach,” she says. “Close to an edge of the island.”

Tuesso’s face tightens.

“Yes, I thought that strange,” he agrees. “We didn’t pick up on it when we toured the edge of the island via boat, or through our satellites. My guess is the Shimmer hides it just enough that we don’t see it.”

“How far is it?”

“Couple days,” Tuesso says, shrugging. “I think.”

“Think we might lose more time today?”

Tuesso’s eyes slide to her. “I’m starting to wonder if that’s a bad thing.”

Jyn looks away from Tuesso, to the dark forest. These trees are all huge, massive in height and width, branches stretching at uneven intervals. Distant animal cries, of birds and crickets and other things she can’t identify, interrupt the otherwise silent air. The only light comes from the hazy moon overhead, and from Tuesso’s lantern, meaning everything is a blur of darkness.

It is far spookier than Jyn thinks it ought to be.

“The first team,” she says. “Were they like this one? Made up of volunteers?”

Tuesso glances at her. “They were all soldiers, from Special Forces. But yes. Volunteers. No one was ordered to go.”

“So what made any of us volunteer for this?”

“Why would I know?”

“I heard you’re a psychologist,” Jyn says. “I wonder if that’s why _you_ were initially approached for this assignment. And, you… The way you look at us. Except for Cassian, I guess; but the rest of us. Like you’re studying us. What do you think? Why…”

She thinks of Nerezza Andor’s wild eyes, Melshi’s screams, his shifting insides.

The massive octopus, the lost time, Bodhi’s scarred arms.

“Why would anyone volunteer for a suicide mission,” she whispers.

“You’re asking me as a psychologist?”

“Yeah.”

Tuesso considers it. “Well. Speaking as a psychologist, I would say you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction. They’re very different. Very few of us actually commit suicide, but almost all of us self-destruct. In some way. We drink, do drugs; we harm ourselves; we throw away a promising career.” He pauses, looks at her. “We break up our happy family. We walk away. We don’t return their calls. We don’t come back to them. We don’t let them come back. We don’t forgive them. We don’t forgive ourselves.”

Jyn raises her chin.

Not in defiance, but in acknowledgment.

“But these aren’t… true decisions,” Tuesso continues. “They’re impulses. And I would say you’re better equipped to explain them. As a biologist.”

This throws her. “How so?”

“Isn’t self-destruction coded into us? In our cells?”

Tuesso’s voice is soft, so soft, and Jyn finally says the thought that’s been slowly coming to her since she met him.

“But I’m not really the expert on how cells turn against their host, am I?”

At first, she thinks Tuesso is going to ignore her.

His face is devoid of emotion, just as pale and expressionless as it’s always been, his skin almost shining in the moonlight.

And then, he _smiles._

It’s a grim, sardonic sort of smile, but still; a smile.

“You’re an observant woman, Dr. Erso,” he says.

“An FBI agent immediately connecting a flower growth to a malignant tumor,” she murmurs. “An FBI agent who volunteers for a suicide mission. An FBI agent whose office is devoid of personal effects but well-stocked with tea, sprite, and ginger ale. I wasn’t sure about your hair, but--”

“I used to have very impressive black hair,” Tuesso says, running a hand over his hairless scalp, the tip of his pinky brushing the skin on his forehead where eyebrows once existed. “It all fell out, fairly early in the chemo. I shaved the rest as soon as I could.”

“What kind?”

“Small-cell carcinoma,” Tuesso murmurs. “Started out with a silly cough. Unexplained weight loss, unexplained weakness and lethargy. The usual. The mass on the chest x-ray was so huge it made the technician gasp. I knew then.”

Tuesso doesn’t look at her as he speaks, and Jyn is grateful. She doesn’t know what her face is doing, what she might be expressing. All she can feel is horror.

Horror, in the face of the existential horror that is a body turning against itself. Horror, of a cellular change she has studied, a cellular change that is _just_ a cellular change, save for the fact it is working and evolving against us.

“I’m so sorry.”

“It is what it is,” Tuesso says. “Chemo bought me a little time. But it’s terminal. I’m not looking forward to my inevitable, gruesome decline.” He looks at her. “It was an easy yes, volunteering for this mission. I’m already dying. If I don’t leave the Shimmer; well. Better to die on my feet.”

She shakes her head. “Agent, I--”

“You know, Doctor, you can probably call me Kay, at this point.”

She smiles. “Okay. Jyn for me, then.”

“Jyn,” Kay repeats. “Alright. I wanted to… Well. I know I’m… unsociable. Standoffish. I’ve always had a… difficult time, meeting new people, making friends. But I also know I’ve… The diagnosis has made me bitter, and cold, in a way I never was before.”

Jyn remembers Baze calling Kay a robot, remembers her not disagreeing, and feels sick, and ashamed.

“So I’d like to apologize,” Kay says. “I don’t dislike you.”

“Thanks, Kay,” Jyn says. “And it’s fine. I’m… I’m a bit of a jerk, and I don’t even have fucking cancer.”

Her comment makes Kay laugh, as she had hoped it would.

“But, perhaps,” Kay says, “There is something you could tell me about my cancer that would cheer me up. Something I don’t know. If anyone could find something… Something interesting, or even remarkable in it, I’d like to know. I expect a biologist might know a fun fact or two.”

She nods, and she thinks, and immediately she thinks of something to tell Kay Tuesso, something _fun_ he might not know, and she opens her mouth--

A noise, like aluminum foil being ripped, interrupts her.

Both she and Kay turn, to look at the forest line.

“What was that?” Jyn asks.

Kay drops the map, instead picking up his rifle. He leans it on the wall, peering through the night-vision scope.

Running feet makes Jyn spin around. Cassian is sprinting to them, Chirrut at his heels, his walking cane waving frantically through the grass.

“I saw something,” Cassian says, somewhat out of breath; he’s run from the top of the tower. “Moving through the trees. Caused a bunch of birds to fly away.”

“Did you see what it was?” Kay asks, still looking towards the tree line.

“It’s big.”

Cassian stops by the guard hut, lifting his own rifle towards the tree line. Chirrut stops at his other side, hands gripping his walking cane tightly, turned in the same direction. Jyn has no rifle of her own, but she does have her handgun, and she unholsters it now, mirroring Kay’s position.

“Do you hear that?” Chirrut whispers.

Cassian glances at him. _“What?”_

To Jyn, it is very quiet, save for the ragged breath of the four humans facing the forest, the soft swaying of the grass in the cool breeze, the occasional calls of crickets in the brush, and then--

“Fuck,” Kay hisses.

“What?” Jyn whispers back.

“Something’s come through the fence.”

_“Through_ the fence?” Cassian repeats.

Jyn can’t see anything in the darkness ahead, but she squints anyway, trying to spy the chain-link fence that surrounds the entire base.

“Something’s ripped the fence open like fucking tissue paper,” Kay snaps.

She recalls the aluminium foil tearing sound, and feels her stomach turn.

It’s quiet again, as Kay and Cassian face the fence ahead, searching the tall grass before them with the lenses of their rifles. Jyn feels very exposed, very open to attack, hidden behind the meager half-wall, protected by a handgun, unable to see much of anything.

At least she can see some things.

She turns, finding Chirrut; he’s still at Cassian’s side, though perhaps standing closer to the captain than he would normally.

“Chirrut,” Jyn whispers, and he turns his head, wide blue eyes meeting hers.

She stretches her arm out.

Suddenly, he turns away, looking to his left side.

The next thing she knows, she’s looking into darkness.

Chirrut is gone.

It is at first very still, and then suddenly very loud.

Jyn can hear loud, ragged breath, the sound of grass and twigs snapping, Cassian and Kay calling to each other.

But mostly, she can hear Chirrut screaming.

_“AHHHHHH! NO!!!! HELP ME! HELP ME! HELP MEEEE-AHHHHHHH!!!”_

He sounds absolutely panicked, terrified, more afraid than anything Jyn has ever heard, or felt, in her whole life.

The sound makes her freeze.

Something is dragging him, pulling him, across the tall grass, back towards the fence line.

Kay shoves past her, running out of the hut, following Cassian, who is already halfway to the fence line, chasing the haunting sound of Chirrut’s screams.

“CHIRRUT!”

Baze is a blur of wavy hair and tan clothes, rifle loose in hand, galloping after the men. He screams after Chirrut, their yells mingling and diverging, sharing the same panicked tone. But Chirrut’s is more visceral, more desperate; and fading much more rapidly.

“Chirrut,” Jyn whispers, alone in the hut, frozen on the spot.

She can hear Cassian, Kay, and Baze shouting Chirrut’s name, can hear them rattling the chain-link fence as they walk it. She can see dim lights from their flashlights scouting the area, revealing a hole in the fence, one twisted at the edges, like something had simply _pulled_ it open.

What she cannot see: Chirrut, nor the thing that grabbed him.

(As Chirrut had not seen the thing that grabbed him.)

What she cannot hear: Chirrut, nor the thing that grabbed him.

(But Chirrut had heard the thing that grabbed him, and turned, but couldn’t avoid it.)

The point is: they’re gone. Chirrut is gone.

Vanished. Disappeared.

Into the dark.

Into the Shimmer.

 

* * *

 

“We have to go back.”

The sunrise creeps over the horizon. Jyn stands stiffly, arms around herself, eyes trained down to the wooden floor of the guard tower. Bodhi’s voice is soft, but everything else around him is near silent, and so his voice carries like a scream.

Except no; not a scream.

Chirrut screamed.

_That_ was a scream.

All of the yells and shrieks she’s heard before it, all those noises she’d stupidly classified as screams, were nothing in comparison to the noise that came out of that man’s mouth.

She closes her eyes.

“We can’t,” Cassian says, voice hard, and just as jarring. “We knew, going to Scarif, going into the Shimmer; we knew we could die. We _knew.”_

“Yeah, from radiation poisoning, or something,” Bodhi insists. He’s sitting on the floor, arms wrapped tightly around his knees, glowering up at Cassian with resolve. “Not from a fucking… _monster.”_

“Did you see it?”

The question comes from Baze. He’s crouched on the ground, eyes wide, face tense with shock and the dregs of horror. He stares up at Bodhi, and for the first time ever, Jyn thinks there might be a trace of hope in his eyes.

But the hope is so pained; because the hope is only for vengeance.

Vengeance, to kill the monster that has almost certainly killed his husband.

Jyn turns her eyes up to the ceiling, desperate that it will be enough to hide her tears.

“None of us saw it,” Kay says, voice robotic and smooth. “It was far too dark. And we didn’t know what we were looking for, exactly.”

“It came out of nowhere,” Cassian murmurs.

Jyn swallows.

_Chirrut._

“Cassian is right,” Kay says. “We can’t go back. We can only move forward. At least, with the map, we know exactly where to go.”

Baze shakes his head. “We have to find Chirrut.”

Cassian’s expression turns sympathetic. “Baze…”

“I am not leaving this island without his body.” Baze glares up at Cassian, and then turns his head, training his glare on them all. Jyn forces herself to meet his gaze. “We bought a plot big enough to hold our daughter and us. I need to bury him with her.”

Bodhi looks stricken.

Cassian’s sympathy warps into a decision. He nods.

“We move forward,” he says. “And if we find Chirrut, we find Chirrut. But our mission still stands. We won’t deviate or stray from it. We won’t let his death be for nothing.”

After another tense moment, Baze nods.

Jyn picks up her pack, and says nothing.

 

* * *

 

Reduced from six to five, they walk into the forest.

Sunlight slips into the trees, angled and passing through a spectrum of colors, refracting, purples and blues and oranges alike. Small pools filled with translucent fish the shape and size of pencils litter the forest floor, tiny flowers of neon orange and periwinkle blue waving under the surface. Clearings of wildflowers, mutated and deformed, peek out at them from all directions. The bird calls tremble from tree to tree, birds with plumage as brilliant as suns and stars flying overhead.

For the first time, Jyn does not look around her with awe and curiosity.

Rather, she looks with foreboding, and fear.

She is searching for monsters.

The Shimmer, this island; once so terrifying, yet also undeniably otherworldly in a most lovely, extraordinary way, has become only an unknown horror. A terror unlike any other.

Jyn focuses on the sound of grass and branches snapping under her boots, wishing she could pretend she was just on a Saturday morning hike on the Cunningham Falls Trail.

Baze is in front of her, and she finds herself stepping closer, to loop an arm through his. He lets her, and the two of them walk side by side. He sighs, leaning his shoulder down onto hers.

“Do you hear the birds, little one?” he asks, and she is so sad, and so touched by his soft voice, by his term of endearment, she can only nod. “I keep thinking if I listen hard enough, I can hear Chirrut. Is that crazy? Am I going crazy?”

She shakes her head. Baze’s smile is grim.

Ahead, Cassian abruptly stops.

Jyn freezes.

She watches as Cassian walks forward, into the glen, bending to pick something up.

Baze moans.

It’s a boot.

A familiar brown boot, identical to the boots they’re all wearing.

“Chirrut,” Bodhi whispers, from behind Jyn.

Cassian nods.

“He might still be alive,” Baze says.

“Unlikely,” Kay murmurs, just loud enough for him to hear. Baze whips his head around to glower at the agent.

“I have to know,” he snarls.

“He’s right.”

Everyone startles, turning to look at Jyn. She hasn’t spoken all morning. She swallows.

“If Chirrut _is_ still alive,” she says, “Then he needs our help. We can’t just… We can’t leave him. Not if there’s a chance. He would do the same for any of us.”

She has not known Chirrut for long, only a handful of days. But it is possible to learn the shape and scope of another human being in that short time, particularly when facing a grueling, frightening, unique mission into the heart of an unknown thing. Some circumstances demand intimacy.

She _knows_ Chirrut. She is certain he knows her.

_“The strongest stars have hearts of kyber, Jyn.”_

Cassian looks at her. He nods.

“Agreed,” he says. “But I’m not risking the entire team, nor the mission.”

“I’m coming with you,” Jyn says, automatically.

He studies her. She stares back.

“Okay,” he says.

“Me, too,” Baze begins, but it is Jyn who turns to him, shaking her head.

“We don’t know what condition Chirrut may be in,” she murmurs. “And if he’s… If he’s _dead…”_ Quietly, so the others don’t hear, she adds, “He told me about what happened to you. After you found your daughter in that car. It cannot happen again, with your husband. He wouldn’t want that for you, not because of him.”

Baze’s dark brown eyes turn haunted.

He does not disagree, though she expects it is only the horrible memory of falling into alcoholism and despair, despair and grief so heavy he almost lost everything, including himself, that prevents him from arguing with her.

“Kay, stay with them,” Cassian instructs. “If Jyn and I are not back in two hours… Keep going to the Citadel.”

Kay stills. “Cassian--”

“That’s an order,” Cassian snaps.

And Kay does not argue either.

“Understood, Captain,” he says, his voice more robotic than ever.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SORRY but if you saw ANNIHILATION; you knew this was coming.
> 
> my obsession with symbolizing Cassian with a moon continues from the Nonsense into this AU. he also "glows" here.
> 
> (all the tattoos in this story are very important!)
> 
> quite a bit of Jyn and Kay's talk is dialogue lifted straight out of ANNIHILATION. critical to the themes and finale of this story.
> 
> past the halfway mark of this story now!


	7. Resting Places

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So the Shimmer brought it to you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: :(

* * *

  

_My head is a howling wilderness._

\--Edna St. Vincent Millay, in a letter to her mother

 

* * *

 

 Jyn and Cassian walk into the thicket.

Beyond the forgotten boot, they find specks of blood. Dotted over fern leaves, speckled over moss like dew, brushed like paint strokes over gnarled oak trees. It is a grisly, depressing trail, and Jyn and Cassian follow it in silence.

“You don’t have to come with me,” Cassian suddenly says, glancing back at her.

“I think I do,” Jyn says. “I have a bad feeling about this. Whatever we find at the end of this trail; it won’t be… pleasant. You shouldn’t face that alone.”

Cassian stops, twisting around to face her.

His expression is torn, wavering between moved and dismayed.

“Whatever you think I am,” he says, softly. “I’m not that kind of man.”

“What?”

“The kind of man who would find a mangled, dismembered body, and be horrified by it. Traumatized. When I have only ever been the kind of man to make a body look like that.”

“I didn’t say you were,” Jyn begins, but he shakes his head.

“You didn’t say it, no,” he agrees. “But I see the way you look at me.”

She feels a blush rising in her cheeks.

She hadn’t thought herself obvious.

It’s just been a long time since she’s met someone, and felt… Close. Felt like she wanted to be close to them. Felt like she wanted to talk to them as much as possible, to learn and to understand them. She doesn’t know why she feels like this about Cassian. It has been far too short a time.

But, like Chirrut, like Baze and Bodhi and Kay; she knows him.

She feels him in her bones.

So, now, she says, “And I see the way you look at me.”

She isn’t stupid, either.

“It changes nothing,” Cassian says, not denying her words. “After this, you go back to Baltimore, and I… I don’t know where I go. But I’ll find out. And it will not be a place for following.”

She bites her lip, but can’t think of an argument.

“But maybe I’m not what you think I am, either,” she says instead.

He glances at her. “I know a lot about you.”

“You know facts,” she says. “Like I know facts about you. But you still insist I don’t know _enough._ Ergo…”

“You’re the daughter of a terrorist,” Cassian says, and she freezes, alarmed by the frostiness of his tone. “But your own hands are clean. And that makes us very different. And that is everything.”

He turns away.

She watches him go, and then she sighs.

And still: she follows.

They’re approaching a clearing when they hear a noise that jars the otherwise tranquil silence of the forest. Cassian crouches behind some foliage, simultaneously reaching back to seize Jyn’s wrist, pulling her down with him.

“What do you see?” she whispers.

Cassian has a peculiar look on his face. He jerks his head forward.

“See for yourself.”

Jyn peers around him.

She’s braced herself for the sight of the monster that dragged Chirrut away, braced herself for the sight of something feasting on Chirrut’s corpse, but Cassian’s expression and tone of voice doesn’t imply either of those visions. Still, she steels herself, and looks into the clearing.

It’s a deer.

Or something that was once a deer.

The deer’s head is down, grazing on the tall grass that populates the space. The deer is a brilliant white, almost opulent, and certainly unusual if not completely unheard of in this part of the world, on this isolated island. She thinks it looks like a poor composite sketch of a deer, as if drawn by someone who had attempted to guess what a deer would look like based off vague and bewildering descriptions. Or like a unicorn from a Renaissance tapestry, what with this deer having elongated legs, a tall and thin neck, and a back curved with a hump. As she watches, it lifts its head. Its antlers are oddly wide, spanning four feet, but thin, and pink flowers blossom out of them as on tree branches.

Jyn smiles.

The deer cocks its head, and watches them.

And then something steps out from behind it.

It’s a second deer. This one looks like the polar opposite of the first; its white coat is patchy, falling out, like the deer itself is decaying, exposing its skin, blemished with red patches of sickness. Its face is skull-like, eyes so dark nearly invisible (or, part of Jyn wonders, they aren’t even there) a nose with gaping holes for nostrils. This deer’s antlers are bare, like the branches of trees you’d only see in the dead of winter.

The deer stare at them, heads cocked to identical angles.

And then they run away.

They run in sync, gait extended and fluid, leaping gracefully away.

“Well,” Cassian says. “That was odd.”

 

* * *

 

They find Chirrut in the shadows, at the base of a tall, wizened sort of willow.

Cassian spots him first, as a pale, bare foot peeking out of above-ground roots.

He turns to Jyn. “You don’t have to see this.”

As before, she says, “I think I do.”

Baze will ask questions, and she’s not sure she trusts Cassian to answer them very well.

They walk forward.

Chirrut lies on his back, a patch of sunlight illuminating him, and at first, Jyn thinks he is only resting.

And then she takes in the carnage.

His abdomen has been torn open in a most violent way, shredded, as if by giant, yet thin, claws. His ribs are broken, snapped and sharp, tilted up towards the branches of the weeping willow, the sun making the blood still glistening on them shimmer in the odd light. One of his legs is bent at a grotesque angle, his bare foot obviously broken.

But his face: it’s unblemished. Untouched.

Pale, sightless blue eyes look up at the sky. His mouth is closed, and blood speckles his cheeks, but he almost looks peaceful.

Cassian sighs, and pulls a notebook out from a pocket. “I’ll note his position.”

Jyn slides to her knees next to Chirrut.

She closes his eyes.

 

* * *

 

They return to the team.

Baze leaps to his feet when he sees them. His eyes take in their expressions.

Jyn watches him crumble.

Bodhi reaches him first, dropping to his knees beside Baze as the man keels over, pressing his face into the mossy ground. Kay stands behind them, face twisted in true, sad expression. Jyn darts to Baze’s side, dropping in front of him, running her hands through his messy black hair.

“He’s lying under a willow,” she whispers. “His face is tilted up to the sky. His mouth and eyes are closed. He looks… peaceful.”

“But he’s dead,” Baze moans.

Jyn nods, tears sliding down her face. “Yes, Baze. He’s dead. I’m so sorry.”

Around them, the birds have stopped calling.

 

* * *

 

They keep going.

It took him ten minutes, but Baze did manage to stand up, to get up from the grief that dragged him to the earth. His eyes are dark, weary, and Jyn has to force herself to not include the word _dead_ in her thoughts as she looks at him. He’s jittery, going by the way his hands fidget as he walks, scratching at his palms and arms, as if he is desperate to escape his body. She cannot blame him for the pain he’s feeling; heaven knows she’d be inconsolable if she lost someone she loved on this island.

She thinks, inevitably, of her father.

_Where are you, Papa?_

_Papa, are you here?_

_Papa, what have you done?_

She thinks of Nerezza Andor, and her words.

_“This place is death.”_

Jyn wonders if any of them will make it out of this alive.

It’s becoming increasingly unlikely.

She thinks she should be more afraid of this outcome than she is. Or, at least, dreading it more.

She jolts when a hand touches her arm.

But it’s only Kay, frowning worriedly down at her.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” Jyn mumbles.

Kay looks unconvinced. “You’ve had quite a shock.”

“I think we all have, honestly,” she replies, brushing her sweaty bangs out of her eyes.

The humidity has been increasing as the time passes. Sweat covers everyone’s faces, and they’ve all lost their jackets, walking in undershirts and tanks (save for Bodhi, who keeps his jacket on, likely trying to cover the self-harm scars he probably doesn’t remember Jyn seeing). Jyn’s tied her hair up, off her neck, but she still feels a little like she’s drowning in heat.

She glances at Kay, who matches her with his identical black tank.

Her eyes fall to the tattoo on his bare left forearm.

“K-2SO?” she reads.

“Ah, yeah,” Kay mumbles, flushing a little, turning his pale skin pink. “It’s, uh. My name.”

“Kay Tuesso,” Jyn says, taking care to enunciate the words. Her lips quirk in a smile. “Ha. I see.”

“It’s stupid,” Kay mutters. “But that’s how I’d say my name, when we ran Morse code drills at Quantico. It was quicker than my full name. So everyone started typing or writing my name out like that as shorthand, and it kind of stuck.”

“Literally, with the tat,” Jyn notes.

Kay rolls his eyes. “Yes, yes.”

She laughs, stilling when she sees her breath in front of her face.

The temperature seems to plummet all at once. The sweat on her face and back freezes, and the shiver jolts through her, nearly trembling her pack off her shoulders. Goosebumps pebble her bare arms, and her fingers begin to turn blue.

“What the hell,” she gasps.

The world around her is still green and full, the forest thick and healthy.

But ahead, through a break in the tree, through a gap like something has reached, and torn a crack out of the world: Snow.

Cassian is stopped just in front of the break, snow brushing his boots. He’s completely still, frozen, the black moon on his shoulder blade making a stark contrast with the wall of white in front of him. As she watches, snowflakes drift through the open gap in the path, settling into his dark hair.

The gap is completely silent, the snow falling without sound.

“Cassian,” Kay calls, voice deep.

Cassian turns around.

He looks deeply unnerved.

“I know this place,” he whispers.

“What place?” Bodhi asks, stuttering through suddenly frozen lips, zipping up his jacket with shivering hands. Baze has already dropped his pack to return his coat to his shoulders, and Jyn and Kay quickly follow suit. Only Cassian remains bare armed, his jacket held loosely in his hand.

Without a word, he turns, and walks into the gray light, disappearing from sight.

_“Cassian!”_ Jyn yells, instinctively.

She hurries after him, the team following.

She steps through the break in the trees, emerging into a whole new world.

The trees are gone, giving way to an open white tundra. She can see no trace of the pale colored sky that has dominated the Shimmer; rather, the sky is a mess of gray clouds, clouds tinged with deep purples and dark blues, indicating the Shimmer is still above them. The trees and forest remain behind her, but the side facing her is dead like winter, heavy with snow.

“This is impossible,” Baze whispers.

“Yes,” Kay agrees. Bodhi has been stunned silent.

Cassian has walked ahead, stepping confidently through the snow. He seems unaware of the cold, the frost licking at his bare arms. He’s staring around him, eyes wide and discomfitingly child-like.

“This is, um,” he tries, and swallows, voice carrying over a thin, frigid wind. “This is a place. In Mexico. Fest. The town where my mother grew up. I, um. We used to visit it, when we lived in Mexico, we’d… She’d take us home, and we’d… The snow, and the…”

He’s still walking forward, and Jyn and the others follow reflexively.

“Why is it here?” Jyn asks.

The solid ground of the tundra gives way to a sheet of thick, impenetrable ice.

“It can’t be here,” Cassian replies.

“That isn’t what I asked,” Jyn says, and it makes him pause, turning to look at her. “I asked: _why_ is it here?”

There is something prickling at her, at the corner of her mind. She feels like she is missing something, a puzzle piece, and that Cassian is the one holding it.

Surprisingly, the piece comes from Bodhi instead.

“Because you were thinking about Fest,” he says.

Bodhi, who was yanked into the swamp by an impossibly huge octopus. Bodhi, who cowered in front of the distorted corpse of Melshi. Bodhi, who was afraid of sleeping in the barracks.

Bodhi, who looks calmer than any of them now.

“You were thinking about Fest,” he says, and his voice is smooth, brown eyes large and close to _tranquil._ Revelation drips from him like sweat, and Jyn is desperate to understand what he has suddenly understood. Goosebumps having nothing to do with the temperature rise on her neck. “So the Shimmer brought it to you.”

“The fuck are you talking about?” Baze asks.

Cassian shakes his head.

“I wasn’t thinking about Fest,” he says. “I was thinking about Nerezza.”

“Nerezza,” Kay repeats, as the wind blows hard over the ice again, and Jyn lifts a hand over her eyes, turning to look at the clear ice ahead.

And there, about twenty yards away: there is something dark.

She frowns, cocks her head to the side, and begins to walk.

“Jyn,” Cassian starts, but she passes him without a word, determinedly walking to the spot.

When she’s about five yards away, she realizes what it is.

She stills, and turns on the spot, but Cassian has been following her, and so she can only hold her arms out, pressing her palms into his chest.

“Stop,” she snaps.

Bewilderment crosses his face. “What? Why?”

Kay, following him as always, steps around Cassian, and she doesn’t have enough arms to prevent both men from stepping around her, and if it’s going to be one of them, she’d prefer Kay.

But Kay, for the first time, fails to keep his reactions and emotions in check.

“Holy _fuck,”_ he gasps, eyes locked on the thing under the ice, and Baze and Bodhi come running, and Cassian stares at Jyn.

“Jyn,” he whispers. “What won’t you let me see?”

“Please,” Jyn says, but she knows it’s useless.

She knows that single word has already told Cassian what is under the ice.

He shoves her away, and takes a step, stopping like he’s run smack into a wall.

“No,” he whispers, and he drops to his knees, crawling frantically forward, stopping until he’s hovering above the ice, staring down at his sister, under the ice.

Nerezza’s brown eyes are wide open, glossed over. Little frozen bubbles hang around her opened mouth, and her hair is suspended, curls branching out and frozen still, a halo adorned in deadly icicles. Her arms are bent at the elbows, palms turned upward to the ice above her.

Almost like she tried to break the ice, to get out, before the rime coated her lungs, before she drowned in it.

“Ezza,” Cassian gasps, mirroring her position, his palms pressed to the surface. “Ezza, no--”

He slams his fist against the ice above Nerezza’s face, but it doesn’t crack. He does it again. And again.

“Cassian,” Kay says, reaching for his shoulder, but Cassian shakes him off.

It is obviously a lost cause, Nerezza is so obviously dead, but still, Cassian tries to get to her. He claws at the ice, fingers desperately trying to make a dent in the thick surface, scrabbling uselessly and ineffectively. He might as well have been tearing at metal for all the progress he was making.

Jyn watches, until she sees the thin lines of red on the ice above Nerezza’s face, like claw marks have scoured it, and sees that the blood is on the surface of the ice, and not under it.

“Cassian, stop,” Jyn says, dropping to her knees next to him. His nails are broken, fingers now bloody, but he doesn’t slow, tearing at the ice with the desperation of a man trying to save what he loves the most.

She grabs Cassian’s arm, and he fights her, trying to shake her off, but she holds firm, and leans forward, wrapping her other arm around Cassian’s shoulders, pulling him back to her, until his face is in her shoulder, and he can no longer see his frozen, drowned sister.

His sobs are shredded, coming out of him forcibly and unwelcomely, and he clings to Jyn, bloody hands digging into her hastily-thrown on jacket, and she keeps one arm tight around his back, while she lifts the other to run her hand through his cold hair.

“Ssh,” she croons. “Ssh. I’m so sorry, Cassian.”

In front of her, Kay crouches on the other side of Nerezza. Cassian’s blood has already frozen, affixed to the ice, a most despairing kind of memorial. She watches as Kay runs his own fingers over Nerezza’s face, frozen under a solid six inches of ice.

So close, and so impossibly far away.

Kay’s bald head almost blends into the white landscape, but his eyes look pitch black in it. It is these eyes that gaze down on Nerezza Andor, these eyes that look so terribly sorrowful.

It is a quiet, warm farewell.

Jyn holds Cassian to her.

Baze and Bodhi are silent.

The snow continues to fall.

 

* * *

 

Like with Baze earlier, they manage to get Cassian to stand, and to leave the ice.

They return to the forest, stepping back into green and foliage, and the air warms, humidity seeping back over their frozen cheeks and frost-stiff clothes.

Cassian and Kay are the last through. Cassian closes his eyes.

And just like that: the snow-covered world, the tundra and the lake of ice: it all disappears, the gap in the trees vanishing, like none of it was ever there.

The forest realigns itself, chirps and clicks of insects and rustling of leaves and grass return, and for a moment, all is right.

The team looks at Cassian, and Jyn is sure their faces are all mirroring the others, united in their sorrow and sympathy.

He shakes his head.

“Let’s go.”

 

* * *

 

They walk for hours.

The forest around them remains largely the same. Impossible flowers, towering trees, the glimpse of an occasional, bewildering animal. They find no sign or trace of the monster that killed Chirrut, and no one has any other run-ins with dead family members.

Jyn thinks they are all determinedly thinking of anything except their families.

But it’s hard for her to do so, she thinks.

Because this is her father’s creation.

The Shimmer, in its strangeness. The way it warps, the way it kills. She can’t connect any of it to Galen, cannot understand how he made such a thing. It only appears reminiscent of his work in that it is groundbreaking, unique, and astonishing.

But it is so cruel, so traumatizing, so dangerous.

It makes Jyn feel like she never knew her father at all.

She has so many good memories of him, of him smiling, of him tossing her into the air so she could laugh, of him wrapping his arms around Lyra and kissing her grinning face, of him cooking dinner in their kitchen in Baltimore, of him reading the newspaper on the sofa, saving the crossword for Jyn to attempt.

But if Cassian was able to summon his sister’s dead body through thought alone; then perhaps Jyn can do the same with Galen.

Even if that means dragging his corpse out from the Shimmer’s grasp.

Like Baze had to know; like Cassian had to know.

She has to know.

If he is dead, if it too late for her forgiveness and for his; then she needs to know. She needs to figure out what the next step is, if there can even be one.

The sun has started to set, orange light refracting and shining, when they reach a campsite.

It looks almost like a town one would find on a long hiking trail. There are half a dozen tiny houses scattered around, each made of plain wood, each nearly overtaken by trees and nature. The grass is waist-high, thin and wispy looking, waving in the breeze. Overhead, the clouds are heavy and dark, lined with green, yellow, and blue; the Shimmer warping the sky.

Kay has paused, staring in bewilderment at a rusty swing set.

“I didn’t know the Empire invested in… such things,” he says.

“It doesn’t.”

Bodhi steps forward. He runs his hand over the beaten poles holding the swing set together, smiling at it. And then he settles down onto the battered swing, gently pushing himself forward.

“This is mine,” he says.

He’s still more relaxed than any of them, still surprisingly calm. As Jyn watches, he grows more confident, swinging back and forth, pumping his legs, hands holding the chains of the swing.

Cassian clears his throat.

“We can camp here for the night,” he decides, surveying the houses. “We should be able to reach the Citadel tomorrow. We pick a house, secure all doors and windows. No one leaves before sunrise.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jyn says.

Baze nods. Bodhi is still swinging, but he nods, looking up to face the team. They all watch as the smile slips off his face, staring at something behind them.

Steeling herself, Jyn turns around.

There are men and women gathered in the empty field.

But; they aren’t men and women.

Or; they aren’t human.

They are plants, trees, impossibly shaped like people. Branches soft and turned down like arms, roots thick and curved like legs, torsos twined together, heads turned in perfect wooden silhouettes. From each person sprouts flowers, all colors and kinds: red peonies, purple freesias, white lilies, yellow daffodils, and others that Jyn can’t recognize, others she assumes are yet more strange and impossible hybrids.

What is consistent: the plants look like perfect topiaries of children and adults.

Some are even holding hands.

“Jesus Christ,” Kay whispers.

Jyn enters the field.

While most of the plants are perfectly human-like, others are deformed. Some have missing or not yet grown limbs, while others have additional legs. One has three heads. Another is missing a head. One is without the insides of its torso, only thin branches holding its neck and head up. A child has thirteen perfectly grown fingers.

“What are they?” Baze asks, trailing Jyn.

“Astonishingly cut,” Kay remarks.

But Jyn has reached one plant, and is bent over to study its structure. She shakes her head, pulling a leaf off a wooden ribcage.

“They grew this way,” she says.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Baze snaps.

“I think it does.”

Bodhi has stopped at a man-shaped plant his exact height. His hand is outstretched, grazing the fingers of the plant, so they appear to be shaking hands. The plant-man has lavender sprouting from his body, and Bodhi snaps a sprig off, bringing it to his nose to smell.

“In fact, it makes total sense,” he continues, turning to look at the others. “Listen. I thought the radios were blocked by the Shimmer. That would explain why no one inside it has been able to reach Yavin. But I mean… Look up. Look at the sky.”

Jyn does, as she’s been doing since she arrived here.

The clouds are heavy, sunlight peeking through, green and blue and purple and yellow and orange.

A rainbow, hazy and spasming.

“The light waves aren’t getting blocked,” Bodhi says. “They’re getting refracted. So, the radio signals; they aren’t gone. They’re just totally scrambled. Bouncing all over the place. Listen.”

Bodhi unclips the radio from his belt, flicking the switch on. Static buzzes.

“Chirrut said he could hear something,” Bodhi says, face briefly twisting at the name. “But I couldn’t, and I just… I wrote it off as nothing. But he was right. _Listen.”_

He turns the volume all the way up.

And there _are_ noises. Distorted and distant tones. An occasional beep. Repeated, lengthened, shortened.

“The signals are split,” Bodhi continues. “Totally scrambled. And, Jyn; that leaf in your hand. You gotta know what you’d see if you sequenced it, right? Hox. Pax 6.”

“What’s that?” Cassian wonders.

“Genes that define body structure,” Jyn murmurs. “Not in plants. But in animals. Including people.”

“Arms,” Bodhi says, gesturing at the plant person next to him. “Attached to torsos, torsos to hips, hips to legs. This isn’t an accident. It isn’t possible, but it is _happening._ The Shimmer; it’s a prism. It’s refracting light, and radio waves, and… and DNA.” He surveys them. _“All_ DNA.”

“What do you mean, _all DNA?”_ Baze demands.

Jyn sighs. “He means our DNA, Baze. Whatever’s happening to this island, to these plants… It’s happening to us, too.”

None of them look at each other.

Jyn stares at the ground.

She thinks her shadow is indistinguishable from the shadow of the plant person next to her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the odd deer, Chirrut's resting place, the plant people, are all taken from ANNIHILATION. Nerezza, the tundra, "Fest", made up by me.
> 
> Nerezza's resting place mirrors her fate in the Nonsense, where Cassian found her dead atop the ice on Fest; and longed to drown with her. here, he tries to reach her, to do just that. 
> 
> Cassian's "I know this place" line is lifted from THE LAST JEDI.
> 
> and there you have it: the Shimmer is a prism. it is refracting everything. absolutely everything.
> 
> \--
> 
> side note: yesterday was the May the 4th Fic Exchange for a certain subset of the ROGUE ONE fandom, and while i did not participate (i am both: a social curmudgeon who doesn't know how to prompt and persnickety writer terrified of getting a difficult prompt), i did "beta" for my friend Callioope! 
> 
> she wrote a super fun in-universe AU that is cute and clever and gave me a reason to go diving into the dumpster that is Wookieepedia, always a pleasure.
> 
> anyway, [her fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14543466/chapters/33603399) is definitely worth a read! especially if you are interested in a palate cleanser for this Grim Chapter.


	8. Under the Skin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s in me. It’s in all of us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: The Bear Scene

* * *

_Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it._

\--David Foster Wallace, from _Infinite Jest_

 

* * *

 

The house they settle in is fairly small, two levels, with a living room big enough for the five of them to sleep comfortably in, a kitchen set to the side, a functioning bathroom a little further away. The house is largely unfurnished, rooms mostly empty, but there is a small table and chairs in the kitchen, a couple empty picture frames hanging on the walls.

Jyn volunteers to take the first watch, and waits for the rest of the team to get into their sleeping bags before going into the kitchen.

She unpacks the field microscope Cassian had given to her before they’d left Yavin, carefully setting it up on the table, along with the samples of the flowers and other fauna she has encountered within the Shimmer. In the poor light, the flower petals seem to glow, and she knows it is almost certainly not a trick of her eyes.

She opens her medical kit, pulling out a scalpel.

With one last, wary glance into the living room, she rolls the sleeve of her jacket up.

Her left forearm is still as mottled as it was the first day she woke in the Shimmer, but the marks have turned darker. They are still fuzzy, she thinks, but have separated, hinting at individual bruises, individual parts. They are becoming specific, she thinks, but she isn’t sure yet into what. One mark looks circular, and she can’t help but think of the phases of the moon on Cassian’s back, and wonders if she will wake up tomorrow to an arm made lunar.

She shoves the scalpel into one mark.

She watches her blood drip out her arm.

Perfectly dark red.

 _Comfortingly_ dark red.

 

* * *

 

Bodhi is right.

It is all she can think, as she stares into the microscope, and watches her cells shimmer.

Colorful, luminous. Neon reds and brilliant purples and spikes of yellow and orbs of blue. Unnatural, twisting, dazzling, glowing. Shimmering.

Her stomach rolls, and she shoves the microscope away.

When she looks up, Baze is standing in the doorway.

“Well?”

“Bodhi is right,” Jyn murmurs. “It’s in me. It’s in all of us.”

Baze nods. “I know.”

He walks to her, and holds his hand out, palm up.

And his skin; something under it is _shifting._

Jyn covers her mouth with her hand.

“I wanted to believe, that Melshi, the man in that video,” Baze whispers. “I wanted to believe I was… seeing things. But even then, I knew… I knew it was reality.” He looks up at Jyn. “If you cut me open; would my insides move, too?”

“Baze,” she whispers.

He drops heavily into the chair next to her, setting his rifle down on the floor.

“I don’t want to change,” he whispers. “I… If Chirrut told you about Kira, he must have told you about me. About what happened to me, after we lost her. I became… Someone horrible. A terrible husband. A broken man. I drank, and I behaved… I was mean. To everyone, but especially Chirrut, because he was the closest to me. I wanted to die, I wanted revenge. I was a monster. I couldn’t handle the grief.”

“Understandable,” Jyn says.

“Chirrut, he…” Baze’s eyes glimmer in the dim light. “He was so gentle, so… Forgiving. Even as I ate him alive, he… He stayed with me.”

Jyn reaches forward, and takes Baze’s hand in hers.

“He loved you,” she whispers.

“Love,” Baze grunts, “Made a beast of me.”

_Her father’s lined face._

_“Everything I do, I do to protect you._ ”

_Cassian’s hands, clawing the ice, red marks left behind._

_Kay’s dark eyes._

_“If you say something incorrect about Nerezza to him, make him doubt her, make him feel… ashamed to be her brother… I will make you regret it. Believe me.”_

_Her anger._

_“Say my name. You are… You can only call me that when you’re trying to be my father. When you actively are being my father. And you have not done that in a long time. You abdicated your role. I think you did when Mama died.”_

_Bodhi’s arms, littered in self-inflicted scars._

_“In fact, it makes total sense.”_

“It makes a beast of us all,” Jyn whispers.

“If the Shimmer is refracting… us, physically,” Baze begins, “What is it doing to our minds?”

She thinks about it.

“It took Cassian’s memory of being in Fest with Nerezza,” she muses. “And made it real. And Bodhi’s memory of the swing set, whenever that was from. And it’s…” She gestures around her. “I was thinking of my father on the way here, and now we’re in his house.”

Because it’s the Baltimore house.

Empty, devoid of most of its furniture and mementos; but it’s the house’s structure, the layout, exactly. Transplanted from her mind onto the island, like her human DNA was taken into the plants, and vice versa.

Cassian and Kay are sleeping where the couch should be. Bodhi is curled in front of the fireplace.

Jyn is in the kitchen, facing the sink where the photo of the Ersos is in Baltimore. Baze sits next to her, arms resting where her stack of mail should be.

For his part, Baze doesn’t look surprised, nor alarmed.

“Nice house,” he says, and her laugh is a shock of sound.

Baze smiles at her, and she sighs.

“I think my father might be here,” she murmurs.

Baze’s back stiffens. “In the house?”

“No,” Jyn says. “I mean out there. In the Shimmer.” She takes a deep breath. “My father is Galen Erso.”

She braces herself for Baze’s alarm, his anger, his disgust.

She does not prepare herself for his small smile.

“I know,” he says, as she stares, agog. “Kay told us. Days ago.”

_“What?”_

“Yes. From my understanding, he told us before Captain Andor asked him not to.”

Jyn flushes. “So… you’ve known this whole time?”

“Oh. Yes.” Baze shrugs. “It has not changed how we think of you, Jyn. Your father… You are not him. You are not responsible for him.”

_Everything I do, I do to protect you._

“I think I am,” Jyn whispers.

Baze frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, he…” She shakes her head. “My mother died, and he went to work in the Empire. Because I pushed him away. He went. And he stayed with them because they threatened me--”

“That isn’t your fault, Jyn.”

“But he made it _for me,”_ Jyn snaps. “The Death Star. He made it _for me._ Because he thought it would be a… a good thing. He thought it would help the world, help _me._ He thought I would _like it._ It was all for me. He said so.”

“Still not your fault.” Baze’s face is kind, so kind, it only makes her feel worse. “But your father might be here. What will you say to him?”

_So much._

“I don’t know,” she says. “I haven’t talked to him in ten years, I thought he was dead, and now all of this… With all he’s done, all he’s…”

She thinks, _Who am I, without my father? Who am I, without my mother?_

Jyn has been alone for so long. Motherless, a runaway, she threw herself into her parents’ world, looked for them in the shape of the things she saw and read about. Geology and physics. Mixed together, analyzed: biology. The study of life.

The study of the Ersos.

The study of _Jyn Erso,_ perhaps.

Searching for meaning in academia, rather than picking up a phone to call her estranged father, and try to make amends.

“What can I say?” she asks, despairing.

“What I would say, if I could see Chirrut again,” Baze says, and at Jyn’s inquiring look, he says, “I love you, and I am sorry.”

A _scream._

Jyn and Baze freeze, eyes locked on each other. The house, already so quiet, seems to quiet impossibly more. Like it’s waiting. Like the very air is waiting.

_“HELP ME!”_

And Jyn knows that scream. That voice.

They all do.

Baze, best of all.

“Chirrut,” he whispers, and turns his shocked eyes to Jyn, and they’re accusing. “You said he was dead.”

“He _is,”_ she croaks. “I saw his body.”

_“NO!!!!! HELP MEEEEE--”_

It’s closer. Right outside.

Baze is up and running, rifle in hand, before she can do anything.

“Baze--”

_“HELP MEEEEE!!!!”_

She gets to her feet, nearly tripping over Baze’s abandoned chair to follow. She makes it into the living room, spotting Bodhi, frozen and transfixed by the fireplace at the corner of her eye, catches Kay trying to peer out of the cracked and dirty window, but Baze is a blur, loudly stomping and sprinting to the front door.

“Chirrut! Chirrut! I’m coming!”

Jyn chases after Baze, who’s fumbling with the front door, tossing the cabinet they’d used to barricade it aside, brutally throwing the door open, looking into the pitch black darkness--

_“PLEASE--”_

And Jyn is forced to stop, because Cassian has intercepted her, grabbing her around the waist and hauling her back--

_“AHHHH--”_

She watches Baze step out into the dark--

“Chirrut! Chirrut!”

She isn’t fighting Cassian, but she isn’t trying to help him either, her body and mind torn between following Cassian’s lead, and running to the front yard to find Chirrut, and Cassian’s breath is hot in her ear--

“Jyn,” Cassian whispers.

And then everything quiets again, so quickly it’s like all the noise in all the world has been sucked out.

Chirrut’s screams; silent.

Baze’s yells; silent.

The entire house, frozen in time.

When Cassian pulls her back, she goes with him.

It is silent, and then it is not.

She can hear a thudding noise, the front steps of the house creaking as something steps upon them. A soft _tck-tck_ noise, thin somethings tapping solid floor. Heavy breathing, of something exerting itself by simply moving.

Jyn and Cassian back up. He turns them, shoving her into the wall on the other side of the opening separating the living room from the front hall, stepping to her side, so the two of them stand with their backs to the wall and whatever is entering the house, and she notices that he chose to dive to catch her rather than go for his rifle, and that he is painfully unarmed. His right arm hangs empty at his side, and Jyn brushes his fingers with hers. He grips her fingers tightly.

Across from them, Jyn sees Bodhi, standing ramrod straight, eyes closed tight, body inserted forcibly into a corner. In the opposite corner, diagonally across from Jyn and Cassian is Kay, rifle drawn and ready, body tense and turned towards the creature that enters the living room.

And it’s a bear.

Or something that was once a bear.

Or maybe something that was never a bear.

It’s bear-shaped, huge, thick black fur marred with missing patches revealing pale skin, massive paws with thin claws sharp as razors. Its front claws are bloody, dark drops staining the wood floor carelessly as it walks. Jyn can only see the right side of the bear, and she sees long, bloody teeth, its mouth opening, nostrils spasming as it smells. It has an eye socket, but the socket is dark and empty. Its head is more skull than skin.

The bear steps into the room, and breathes.

_“Help me.”_

And it’s Chirrut’s voice coming out of the bear’s deformed, twisted mouth.

Jyn bites her lip to keep from screaming.

_God, no. Not this._

The bear turns its head, and she sees there is a human skull coming out of the left side of its face, the right eye socket perfectly intersecting with the left eye socket of the bear, so the two appear to be sharing one disturbingly-human looking, and so familiar, pale blue eye. The bear’s massive jaw ends at where the bottom half of a human’s mouth would end, just under the top half of the human skull’s teeth.

 _“Help me, pleaaaaaaseeee….”_ The bear calls, mouth wide, and behind its line of sharp teeth, she can see a small, perfect half circle of neat human teeth, embedded in its mouth, as if put there by a most unhinged god.

Bodhi had opened his eyes at Chirrut’s voice, and is now trembling so violently Jyn can’t believe the bear hasn’t sensed him through the shaking floor.

The bear ambles further into the room, red lining its open mouth, Chirrut’s screams echoed by Baze’s dripping blood, and Jyn’s heart is going to burst at the pure horror of it all.

Cassian turns his head, his hand practically crushing hers, his voice low in her ear: “Look at me.”

She swallows hard, and turns her head, to meet his dark eyes, so tense and serious.

“Don’t react,” he whispers.

 _How?_ Jyn thinks.

The bear has turned towards Kay, who has absolutely nowhere to go. He lifts his rifle, determination darkening his features, and Jyn can’t breathe, because he might be shooting at the bear at point-blank range, but the bear is obviously _not a bear,_ and she doesn’t think it will be enough.

She is frozen, but she manages to lift her right hand, to wrap her numb fingers around the kyber crystal necklace at her throat.

_Help us._

And her prayer is answered.

The answer comes in the form of Baze, who comes stumbling and limping in the doorway. He’s walking at an awkward angle, blood dripping from his head and neck, hair thick with it. His eyes are dark, fierce, and rigidly determined. Righteous.

 _“Look at me,”_ he snarls.

The bear turns away from Kay, to look at him.

Its mouth opens.

_“HELP MEEEEE!!!!”_

Baze nods. “I will, my love. Forgive me.” And then, almost as an aside, “Let me save us both.”

He lifts his rifle, and he fires.

The bear moves more quickly than Jyn expects, charging across the room to seize Baze and throw him into the wall in the front hall. Baze yells, but continues to fire. Kay leaves the corner, lifting his rifle and following, and Cassian all but tosses Jyn at Bodhi, grabbing his rifle from the floor and turning back around.

Jyn crashes into Bodhi, who emits a soft _oof_ as she does, and when her legs hit the floor she feels a pinch at her thigh, and only then remembers the handgun she’s had holstered there for the last few days. She scurries up to her knees, shoving Bodhi behind her with a foot to his chest (earning her another soft _oof)_ and turns, lifting the handgun, preparing herself should the bear advance.

Baze is still yelling, and Chirrut’s voice is gone entirely from the bear, its roars sounding more natural, more animal-like. Baze has lost his rifle in the bear’s attack, and Jyn sees that he’s trying to grab a hold of the stairs, trying to escape up them, but the bear has him around the middle, preventing him from running.

Kay does not hesitate.

He fires into the bear, seemingly uncaring if he hits Baze or not.

Cassian follows suit.

The bear, weirdly, does not react to their assault. Even as the bullets drive into it, blasting tufts of fur, skin, bone, and blood into the air, the bear keeps its focus solely on Baze. It succeeds in dragging him back down the stairs, throwing him to the floor. He lands hard, on his back, out of breath, unarmed.

He lifts his hands, his right hand brushing the human skull growing on the bear’s head, in an almost tender caress--

And in one quick move, the bear rips his throat out.

Jyn has never seen so much blood.

And it’s like Baze’s death acts as a catalyst, ensuring the bear’s own, quick death. It collapses at last under the hailstorm of bullets from Cassian and Kay, sprawling on its side, mirroring Baze’s own position.

The bear stops breathing before the bullets finish landing, and the house is quiet once more.

 

* * *

 

They don’t sleep the rest of the night. Instead, they sit in the silence of the house.

Cassian covers Baze’s shredded body with Baze’s own abandoned sleeping bag. Kay returns the cabinet to its position as a barricade at the front door. Jyn packs up her field microscope. Bodhi sits in the corner, and doesn’t say a word.

The house smells like blood and rot, the corpse of the bear so intertwined with Baze’s.

But they don’t dare leave the house until the sun rises.

Cassian and Kay are the first out the door, rifles drawn, doing a quick perimeter of the house. Jyn and Bodhi wait on the porch. In the early morning light, everything glows, from the dew-studded tall grass to the dried blood-covered steps, to Jyn and Bodhi themselves.

Bodhi doesn’t pull his jacket on.

She watches him sit in the grass, his scarred arms turned up, to the sunlight refracting overhead. She sits stiffly at his side, and brushes an errant curl out of her eyes.

She aches.

Cassian and Kay return with nothing to report. Jyn had not expected there to be anything; the bear had a purpose, and it completed it.

She thinks of Baze’s tattoo, of Chirrut describing how alcoholism drove Baze into becoming a _monster_ of a man, recalls Baze wondering if he’d be able to hear Chirrut around him, as his husband used to do with bird calls and the longing to hear their daughter’s voice. She thinks of Baze’s ferocity in how he fought the bear, grappling with it, trying so hard to destroy it. How he still touched it with warmth and affection, right before it viciously mauled him.

She aches.

While Cassian writes in his notebook (and what he could be writing, how he could describe the previous night’s events, Jyn has no idea) Kay turns to her, and jerks his head towards the house. She follows him back in without complaint.

“I need you to do me a favor,” he says.

“Sure,” she mumbles, through oddly numb lips.

Kay goes to his pack, digging through for his medical kit. She isn’t sure what she’s expecting him to do, but hand her a stethoscope was not high on the list.

She blinks at it.

Kay pulls his shirt down, exposing his pale chest. “Take my heartbeat?”

“Are you not feeling well?” she asks, and then regrets the question, because _of course_ none of them are feeling _well._ She’s a trembling, horror-struck mess, perpetually a moment away from sobbing.

But another thought strikes her: “Is it… the cancer? Is the Shimmer doing something to it?”

“Just listen,” Kay says, and she nods, and positions the diaphragm on his chest.

She listens.

“I don’t hear anything,” she says, close to relieved.

It takes her another moment to understand what’s wrong with that statement.

Kay is stricken.

“I must have it positioned wrong,” she says, quickly, and moves the diaphragm around the left side of Kay’s chest, listening from his shoulder to under his rib cage. She can’t hear anything.

No lung movements.

No heartbeat.

“Do you have, um, oppositus?” she asks. “Lungs and heart mirrored from where they should be--”

“No,” Kay says. “I don’t.”

She checks anyway.

Still silence.

She lets the stethoscope hang around her neck.

“Why don’t you have a heartbeat?” she asks.

“I noticed it yesterday,” he murmurs. “You know how when it’s very quiet, you can hear your heart pounding in your ears? I noticed it right before the bear came in.”

She doesn’t know what to say.

“I was thinking of what Bodhi said,” Kay continues. “Of the Shimmer refracting DNA. But what happened with… with Chirrut’s voice, and the bear. That wasn’t genetic.”

“No,” she agrees.

“So, it fits…” Kay sighs. “With how the Shimmer might be refracting _everything._ _Everything.”_

“Everything,” Jyn repeats.

Kay reaches out, and takes her left hand. He lifts her arm up, revealing the bruises that have been appearing there since she first woke inside the Shimmer.

In the hazy sunlight, she can see her semi-blurry circle.

Kay holds out his left arm, his _K-2SO_ tattoo.

The _O_ matches her circle, and she realizes her circle was never a circle.

“Tattoos are not genetic,” he murmurs.

“Melshi had the same tattoo as Nerezza,” Jyn says, recalling how strange it was to see Nerezza Andor’s black sun tattoo copied on Melshi’s severed arm on the wall of the base, particularly after Cassian explained the significance of the tattoo for Nerezza.

The sun was her mark; it was her.

Like the bear was baze.

Like K-2SO is Kay Tuesso.

Like the stars on Jyn’s shoulder…

Kay takes her hand, and places it on his right forearm.

Under her hand, his arm is like solid rock.

Or as hard as metal.

“You want to know why K-2SO really stuck, as a name for me?” Kay asks, quietly. “Or do you already know? I know the descriptor for me has been a topic of conversation among the team. You and I even talked about it.”

She doesn’t think she wants to know, but she nods anyway.

His smile is grim.

“It sounds like a robot name. And robots do not have heartbeats.”

 

* * *

 

While Cassian and Kay confer on their next move, Jyn goes to sit next to Bodhi in a meadow of wildflowers.

He’s kneeling, eyes closed, his face turned up to the sun, scarred arms angled with it. His breaths are even and relaxed, and Jyn crosses her legs and tries to find some semblance of comfort in the sunlight.

“Kay doesn’t have a heartbeat anymore,” she says, before she can stop herself.

Kay had not bound her to secrecy, but she doesn't imagine this is the kind of thing one may want to get spread around.

But she needs to talk about it.

She is so afraid.

Bodhi opens his eyes.

“The Shimmer took our thoughts and feelings about Kay,” he says, “And made them real. We thought him a robot, so it’s making him into one. Remaking him.”

Jyn emits a dry sob. Bodhi reaches out, and takes her hand.

“Don’t cry,” he whispers. “Or it will refract your tears, too.”

He looks at her arms, at the K-2SO tattoo forming, at the small cut she’d made in it last night, when she’d taken her blood for testing.

“Be careful where you bleed,” Bodhi says. “You, Cassian, Chirrut, and Baze are the ones who’ve bled in here. I have a feeling that’s going to mean something, before the end.”

“Before the end,” Jyn repeats, a little dazed.

“It was strange,” Bodhi says. “Hearing Chirrut’s voice coming out of that bear’s mouth. Considering what we know now about the Shimmer, how it refracts, and warps, and connects… I think, as he was dying, part of his mind became part of the bear that was killing him.”

And Jyn thinks he’s right.

“That’s horrible, isn’t it?” Bodhi muses, running his fingers over his arms, and Jyn stares, because little blades of grass are growing out of his numerous scars, buds of flowers preening up to the light. “To die, afraid and in so much pain, trapped in the mind of the thing that’s killed you. And that’s all that’s left of you.”

“Bodhi,” Jyn whispers, watching the grass growing thicker on his arms, growing into leaves and flower blossoms.

“I’m so tired, Jyn,” Bodhi says, and there’s a soft smile on his face that’s the most tragic thing she’s ever seen. “When I came in here, I thought I wanted to find absolution. I thought I wanted to be redeemed. But the more I see, the more I… feel, I’ve come to realize; I don’t want to be saved. I never have.”

He gets to his feet in one smooth motion, and Jyn scrambles up on numb legs.

“I don’t want to become what the Shimmer makes of me,” Bodhi murmurs. “It’s always been so difficult to live as myself, and I’ve fought it, but… I don’t want to be a scream coming out of the creature that’s killed me. I want to die as close to _me_ as possible.”

He looks at her, dark brown eyes curling light blue at the edges. Like Chirrut’s eyes.

She trembles.

“You should remember that,” he murmurs.

“Remember what?” she asks, stuttering a little.

“Yourself,” Bodhi replies.

He turns, and walks away.

The plants and vines are growing around his arms.

Jyn watches him go, shock coursing through her at the transformation happening before her eyes.

As soon as he rounds a corner, disappearing from her sight, she gets her legs to cooperate again.

“Bodhi,” she says, and she stumbles after him.

Through the low-hanging tree branches of the willows that dot the meadow, she can see Bodhi in flashes. The flowers and grass on his arms expanding, thickening, turning bright and colorful, flashes of fauna she glimpses before Bodhi rounds a new corner. She hurries after him, but she can’t quite understand what she’s seeing, what Bodhi had been saying.

She trips around a Camphor tree, emerging into the field of plant people.

Bodhi has disappeared.

She looks around, but she doesn’t bother to yell his name.

He’s gone.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I could never come up with something so viscerally and uniquely horrifying as a human scream coming out of a deformed bear. all the credit to the gang behind ANNIHILATION. i've never felt something like that before, seeing it on screen.
> 
> here is a [link](http://twitter.com/BBW_BFF/status/984198334129717248) to a tweet showing the design of the bear, if you want a clearer visual beyond my Attempt at description. 
> 
> ANNIHILATION having Lena and Kane's house within the Shimmer was the most subtle, brilliant thing. 
> 
> and tattoos!!! 
> 
> three chapters to go! i like to think they are a good blend of ROGUE ONE, ANNIHILATION, and my own creativity. it'll be fun. 
> 
> to quote a certain Skywalker: "This is not going to go the way you think."


	9. Remember Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I should have been kinder to you. I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: body horror.
> 
> mood music: "How to Leave Your Body" by John Murphy.

* * *

 

_The energy of attempt is greater than the surety of stasis._

_[...]_

_You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotions._

\--Mary Oliver, from _Sand Dabs, Nine_

 

* * *

 

The sky is bright with color.

She laughs, keeping her face turned up, almost painfully so for her neck, in order to make sure she doesn’t miss a thing. The fireworks light up the sky, brilliant blues and yellows, reds and purples, oranges and greens, embers flaring and smoking in every direction. With each ear-splitting bang and crack, she claps and giggles, until her own sounds threaten to drown out the celebration around her.

“Papa, look!” she yells, pointing at a firework that takes the shape of a five-pointed star, easily dwarfing the real stars millions of miles beyond it.

“I see it, Jyn.”

She glances back. Her parents are sitting on their old secondhand quilt, brought with them to the States from England. The quilt is covered in a light layer of sand from the beach, bits of dirt and grain catching on Lyra’s paperback novel and Galen’s shoes. Jyn already knows she will wear a layer of sand back to the house. She’s fine with it.

“They do this every year?” Jyn demands, gesturing at the fireworks lighting up the night sky.

“Every year,” Lyra says with a laugh. “Every Fourth of July.”

Jyn thinks it was worth moving to the United States just to see a firework show this close.

She clambers up from the beach, as if an extra couple of feet will really get her closer to the explosions overhead.

She walks towards the ocean, towards where the fireworks are fizzling out, disappearing into the sea below. Little bits of sparks and ash flutter down from the sky, as if the stars are weeping tiny tears of glowing light. Jyn holds out her hands as she walks, and wonders what it would be like to catch a piece of a star.

Hands wrap around her waist, and scoop her up.

“Papa!” she shrieks.

Her father’s laugh booms in her ear, loud as the echoing explosions. “What are you thinking about, Stardust?”

She stretches her arms up to the sky. “Touching the stars.”

“I’ve got a star right here,” Galen notes, and she rolls her eyes.

_“Real_ stars, Papa!” Jyn calls, yelling so her voice carries over the fireworks. Past Galen’s head, she can see Lyra, smiling at them from the quilt on the sand. She waves.

“Oh, but you are a real star,” Galen says. “The brightest star of all.”

Jyn rolls her eyes.

“But I think you might have to grow up a bit, before you can reach the biggest stars,” Galen notes, and Jyn huffs, but she thinks he’s right.

“That’s what I’ll do when I’m grown up, then,” she decides. “Touch the stars.”

“And? What else will you do?”

She glances down, but her father’s smile is soft, and warm. Listening patiently.

“And… Travel the world,” Jyn decides, studying the fireworks over her. “Go exploring. Find new animals. Help Mama study her rocks.”

“And help me…?”

She looks at him, smiles, thinks of his super-secret work with the U.S. government that she is not allowed to know about.

“Help you save the world,” she says.

Her father’s smile is still warm, but there’s a haze in his eyes she does not understand.

“Okay, Stardust,” he murmurs, and pulls her down to kiss her cheek. “We will save the world.”

 

* * *

 

She weeps.

Here, and now: Jyn sits in the grass in front of the house that is not her parents’ house, but also is, and she sobs. Ugly, crocodile tears; the kind of tears she has never let herself shed, at least not since she left for California, and she and her father stopped speaking.

She stares up at the house, the cracked windows etched over with vines, the broken roofing tiles precariously tilted over the earth, and she thinks, _Please._

_Please._

She does not know who she is addressing, what she is pleading for. The word comes to her nonetheless. An apology, aimed at no one, except maybe the world. Maybe her father. Maybe herself.

Footsteps interrupt her sobbing fest, and she turns, thinking, _Papa, you’ve come back, you’ve found me, forgive--_

But it is Cassian, kneeling in the grass next to her.

His eyes are somber, and he is sorry, so sorry.

“Jyn,” he says, like the word is enough, like it is a word that has ever been enough.

“What are we doing?” Jyn asks. She’d been hoping to sound forceful, demanding even, but her voice shakes and trembles, and she sounds only pathetic.

“We’re getting the plans to destroy your father’s weapon,” Cassian says, easy as anything.

Somehow, this agenda feels insignificant. It does not feel justifiable, not next to the carnage it has wreaked.

“Why did we walk into the Shimmer,” she murmurs, and it is only half a question.

Cassian is quiet.

“Because we had to,” he says, voice so soft it barely carries over the breeze.

“Did we?”

Cassian looks at her, and for a moment, she thinks there is a sheen of light coming out of his eyes, circling under his skin, lighting him up from the inside, making him glow, turning him ethereal. It is enough to make her breath catch, enough to make her think, _Of course, he’s right, we did._

 

* * *

 

There is nothing to do but to keep going.

Cassian and Kay take the news of Bodhi’s disappearance in stride. It is just another thing on a list of horrid, impossible things. They are all so far out of their depth, so far out of their knowledge of how things work, that to try and quantify all that has happened is impossible.

So all they can do is keep going.

Until they can go no further.

Jyn walks between Cassian and Kay, and none of them say a word as they journey. Jyn is sure they’re all wondering what could possibly lie ahead, what it is they will find in the Citadel. Their team has been halved, lost to the Shimmer and its horrors, and Jyn is sure the Citadel, as the last safeguard protecting the Empire’s secrets and data, will be particularly ruthless and annihilating.

She doesn’t bother to try and predict what she will encounter.

Eventually, the forest parts, and they find themselves standing on a beach.

The white sand ends at the ocean, deep and blue, gray clouds gathering above. It is still obvious that they haven’t left the Shimmer; the ocean water glows, tinged green and yellow, dotted and luminescent, and the clouds have angry bits of purple veining through them. And on the beach, as if growing from the sand, are trees made of shattered glass.

Kay approaches one, arm outstretched.

“Careful,” Jyn starts, but he touches the tree with no resistance.

“How strange,” he murmurs. “Look.”

Jyn and Cassian approach him.

Running through the trunk of the glass tree are numbers, millions of numbers, flickering and changing, moving like a ticker tape. The numbers are digitized in green, and Jyn realizes what they remind her of a second before Kay says it.

“It’s code,” he says. “Source code. Imprinted on these… tumor-like abrasions. I wonder…”

Cassian looks down, at the glass roots buried in the sand, numbers swimming down them, disappearing underground.

He looks back up, further down the beach.

“And I’m guessing they go into _that.”_

Kay and Jyn turn.

It’s smaller than she expected.

It looks less like a _Citadel,_ too. Jyn thinks of citadels as flashy things, technologically advanced to the point of being science fiction, and typically being on higher ground. The Citadel on Scarif is all shining gray metal, the sunlight hitting and refracting off its surface in myriad directions. But it features a tower, maybe twenty meters tall, stretching towards the sky, the rest of the building on the beach, a single floor tall, at sea-level.

“Am I the only one surprised that it’s even citadel-shaped?” Kay asks.

“The Shimmer has been… horrifyingly literal,” Jyn murmurs, and neither man disagrees with her.

Cassian turns back to Kay, looks at him, and suddenly dives forward, grabbing Kay’s arm.

“Cassian, what the--”

“What the fuck is wrong with your _arm?”_

He’s seized Kay’s right arm, the one Jyn had noted that morning as feeling bizarrely hard, like metal. In the sunlight now, it glimmers, not unlike the Citadel ahead.

But what glimmers should not exist.

Patches of Kay’s skin are flaking off, blowing away with the wind. And under his skin, where blood, muscle, and bone should be: it’s charcoal gray metal. Smooth, oddly sinewy in places like a normal arm would be, yet undeniably metal. Jyn reaches forward, and touches the underside of Kay’s arm; it’s cold to the touch, like an old computer in a basement.

Kay swallows.

“Well,” he says. “That’s new.”

_“New?”_ Cassian repeats, and there is not only horror in his voice, but a real, rabid fear that Jyn has not heard from him before; or, at least, not since Nerezza. And she remembers that Cassian and Kay are close friends, have known each other for decades, that there is possibly no one Kay Tuesso loves more than Cassian Andor, and that Nerezza may be the only person Cassian has loved more than Kay. “It’s… It’s fucking… _Ruining_ you, transforming you--”

“I think,” Kay says, “It is making me into something new.”

And Bodhi had said something along those lines as well.

Even Kay’s voice is starting to sound different. More metallic-sounding, if such a thing were possible.

At this point, Jyn knows it is.

They walk the beach.

The sand is thick, a soft white, and they drop their packs onto it carelessly. There is a heightened tension in the air, and Jyn thinks it is not exclusive to the three humans traversing the beach. She thinks the Shimmer itself is tense, watching them warily, sizing them up, picking the best way to kill them, or prevent them from reaching their target.

Kay’s walk is changing. Jyn trails him, and she studies how stiff his shoulders are, how his arms don’t swing, how they move rigidly instead. Cassian, who Jyn has observed walking straight-backed with perfect posture, looks sloppy next to Kay.

They walk past more patches of strange glass, spliced over tufts of seagrass, and then they’re standing in front of the Citadel.

Blocking their path is a skeleton.

A single skeleton, broken into three rows. Legs, arms, feet, hands, and hips, neatly lined side by side; then a skull, solitary, a lone offering; and last, rib cage and spine, standing tall, pointed to the dark sky. Jyn, Cassian, and Kay look at the skeleton, trying to parse out what it means, or whose it was.

“Not Melshi, or Nerezza,” Cassian murmurs. “But perhaps another member of their team made it this far?”

“But how did they become… _this,”_ Jyn asks, waving a hand over the skeleton.

Cassian doesn’t bother to try and come up with a theory.

It would be wrong.

The Citadel begins as a flat, single floor, that leads into the base of the tower, stretching to the sky. From this vantage point, Jyn sees that the very top of the tower is ringed with windows, like the top of a lighthouse.

On the side of the building are patches of pale flowers, little daisies and white lilies, branching out to thick, tree-like branches, smooth as cream and the same shade, diluting the otherwise gray and black of the Citadel. The branches span, thick and arching, and Jyn thinks, _tumors, again._

They approach the single gray door.

Its door knob looks comically commonplace.

Cassian shoots it out, the noise a loud bang in the otherwise tranquil quiet of the beach, the waves lapping the shore behind them. The Citadel offers no further resistance, a gap in the door where the knob had been.

Cassian stretches a hand out, but Kay shakes his head, and beats him to it.

When Kay wraps his fingers around the jagged opening, the skin falls off, revealing five perfect black metal digits. A robot’s hand.

“Kay,” Cassian whispers.

Kay’s smile is pained. “We’re almost there, Cassian.”

His feet make a strange clanging noise when he steps into the Citadel.

It’s an antechamber, Jyn thinks, with a half-circle of a control desk, all buttons and knobs and keyboard and screen. But the three of them hesitate in the doorway, staring at the floor; rather than plain gray metal, as Jyn had expected, the floor is black as the night sky, dotted with lights like stars. It’s swirling too, like something is prodding it. Like it’s alive.

The feeling that they are running out of time hits all three of them at once, and they move.

Jyn darts to the control desk, Kay with his odd stride following her, as Cassian walks the perimeter of the space, studying the walls and ceilings.

“I can’t see any surveillance equipment,” he says.

“God, look at this,” Jyn breathes. The control desk is covered in a light layer of dust; or possibly sand, considering the beach outside, or considering her memory of Galen and her on the beach. Or possibly snow, considering Cassian. “It’s in… binary, I think--”

“Oh, good,” Kay says, leaning over her, and Jyn turns, and loses her breath.

His hairless scalp is in pieces, pale skin floating off, giving way to unforgiving black and gray metal underneath, perfectly smooth, like a brand new skull. The skin covering his jaw has largely fallen away, and she watches the metal under it shift as Kay breathes and speaks, casually conversing with Cassian as if nothing is the matter.

Cassian has his back to them, studying the large, round door set in the far wall.

“Kay,” Jyn whispers. “Can you see me?”

Because one of Kay’s eyes has turned glassy, like the strange glass trees on the beach outside, shining with a dull light refracting with the many colors of the Shimmer.

“Of course, Jyn,” Kay says, and there’s no denying that his voice has changed, _is changing even as he speaks._ It sounds like it’s passing through a modulator, like a thing a child might wear with a Halloween costume.

Cassian turns around, and blanches at the sight of his friend.

He starts shaking his head.

“Kay, get out,” he snaps.

_“What?”_

“The Shimmer is changing you,” Cassian says, and before Kay can interrupt, he adds, “Yes, I know, _into something new,_ but for fuck’s sake, _look at you!_ Kay, you’re becoming a… a…”

“Robot,” Kay supplies. “I’m aware.”

“Then, Christ, _get out!_ It’s moving rapidly, leave before it’s too late--”

Kay’s expression, as poorly as he can make one in his hardening face, is sad. “I think it’s too late, Cassian. It’s been too late for a long time.”

“You don’t--”

“Look at Jyn’s arm, Cassian.”

Frowning, Cassian does. Jyn sighs, and holds out her left arm, the beginnings of the K-2SO tattoo turned to him. He freezes.

“This is not being done on a genetic level,” Kay murmurs. “Or, I should say; _only_ on a genetic level. It’s taking our thoughts, Cassian, and making them manifest. It’s taking our fears. It’s forcing us to live them. And my fear…” He swallows. “When I got my diagnosis, when I saw the treatments, the outcomes, the future… I feared dying as less than human. I feared dying as a shell of one, bones and skin and nothing else.”

“Kay,” Cassian breathes.

“I see… this, now,” Kay continues. “And it is that fear, made literal in a way I did not anticipate. I am to die as less than human, Cassian. Do not ask me to _live_ as less than human.”

Cassian is frozen, one hand gripping Kay’s fully automated arm.

As Jyn watches, Kay’s lips fall away, like ashes.

“Perhaps, if I left the Shimmer now, I could prevent myself from deteriorating into a machine further,” he says. “But I won’t do that. Because then the Shimmer wins, and we fail. Robots may not know how to sacrifice themselves, but humans do. Let me be human.”

He lifts his right arm, the arm that is all metal and digital now, and as she watches he flexes his fingers, his index and middle fingers melding together, whirring, a computer interface arm. He sticks it into a port, and the screen lights up, zeros and ones, lines of code she cannot read.

She closes her eyes.

“I will get this door open, as I was brought on this mission to help accomplish,” Kay says, and she can hear metal fingers clicking over the control desk, looking for the lock on the door in the wall, his arm whirring in the port. “And then you and Jyn will go inside, and find and steal the plans for the weapon. And then you will leave. And you will have completed our mission. And I will have died on my feet; perhaps as less than human, but not for long.”

Cassian’s breath is ragged, and she knows he’s fighting tears. Kay, however, seems to be past the point of being able to cry.

Jyn opens her eyes.

“Kay,” she says. “Did you want to hear that interesting cancer fact now?”

He turns to her, and his dark eyes are gone, replaced by the glass bulbs.

“Jyn Erso,” he says. “I would love nothing more.”

As he works, she speaks.

“The earliest known writing about cancer occurred about five thousand years ago,” Jyn says. “In an Egyptian textbook about trauma surgery. The author describes what we would now call tumors, found in a woman’s breast. The author says they tried to remove the tumors using a tool called the fire drill. It’s exactly what it sounds like. It didn’t work.”

Cassian is silent. Kay works, reading binary, studying tables.

His skin flakes off. His jaw sharpens. His nostrils shrink.

“The origin of the word _cancer_ is credited to Hippocrates,” she continues. “He used the Greek words _carcinos_ and _carcinoma_ to describe tumors. The latter for ulcer-forming tumors, of course.”

“Of course,” Kay agrees.

“In Greek, those words are used to refer to crabs,” Jyn says. “It’s understood that Hippocrates used these words for cancer due to how tumors can spread in finger-like structures, not unlike the shape of a crab. And not unlike the flowers, on the side of the base, as you pointed out, Kay.”

“Interesting,” Kay murmurs.

A lock disengages in the far wall.

“The Latin word for crab is _cancer,”_ Jyn says. “Which also gives name to the astrological sign, the sign of the crab. A Greek physician employed _oncos,_ a word meaning _swelling,_ to further describe tumors. Hippocrates’ crab analogy is still used today to describe malignant tumors, while _oncos_ was the name given to the doctors who developed the study of cancer into a specific medical field: oncologists.”

Kay looks at her, and his face is all metal, the face of a robot, but she thinks he’d be smiling if he could.

“That was very enlightening, Jyn,” he says. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Kay.”

What she does not add is that the name of the doctor who coined _oncos_ as the word for tumor, was Galen.

It doesn’t seem important.

“Let’s go, Kay,” Cassian says, and he and Jyn hurry to the door, thick and wide as the door to a bank vault, before they realize Kay has not followed.

They turn.

Kay is still standing at the control desk.

He is all robot now, his height somehow more natural now that he’s in this form, all dark metal, circuits, wires. He’s staring at the control desk, where his arm is inserted. As Jyn watches, she realizes the desk seems to be vibrating.

“Ah,” he says. “I see.” He looks up at them. “Cassian. I need you to remember something. I need you to remember to not resist. I need you to remember that you don’t always have to fight.”

There’s a sudden loud _beep,_ and a _jolt,_ and Jyn watches as Kay is jerked forward, an inch of his arm pulled into the desk.

“No,” Cassian breathes, and he runs back to Kay, fingers moving wildly over the shaking control desk, as Kay’s arm gets jerked further into it. He’s now bent awkwardly, trying to fit himself around the edge as his metal arm vanishes into it.

“What’s happening?” Jyn asks, going to Kay’s other side. She wraps her hands around his shoulder, pulling.

“I believe the defense system of the Citadel has kicked in,” Kay says, voice alarmingly smooth for the fate awaiting him. “It recognizes I am an intruder, and is endeavoring to destroy me.”

“Yeah, I see that now,” Jyn grunts, tugging with all her might. Kay’s shoulder is creeping closer and closer to the desk; she’ll have to let go soon, before he breaks her hands under his weight.

“Disengage,” Cassian snaps, wedging himself on Kay’s other side, using his body as a buffer between Kay’s free side and the desk. “Pull your arm out.”

“I cannot.”

_It’s pulling him in,_ Jyn thinks, the horror numbing her once more. _Like it took Bodhi._

“Kay,” Cassian groans, clinging desperately to Kay’s shoulder.

“Cassian. Let me go.”

“Kay--”

“I have been dying for a long time,” Kay snaps. “The cancer was always going to get me. You knew that. You knew that was why I came here, so if someone had to die, it would be the one who was going to die soon, anyway. This was inevitable, Cassian. It always was. Let it be.”

“Fuck that,” Cassian snarls, sweat beading at his temple.

Jyn gasps, her knuckles brushing the desk, leaving scraped cuts, and she lets go. Kay’s armpit slams into the desk, and he emits a metalized groan, turning his head to her.

“Jyn Erso,” he says. “I did not expect much from you, when I encountered you in your home in Baltimore, and stabbed you with a sedative.” She can’t help but hiccup a laugh. “But you have constantly amazed and surprised me. I am grateful you accompanied us.”

“Thanks, Kay,” she manages. “For everything.”

“Get Cassian home for me, will you?”

“I will,” she says.

Her blood from her skinned knuckles drips to the floor, but rather than leave stains, it seems to fall _into_ it, into the black sky, disappearing entirely.

“Kay,” Cassian says, and Kay turns his head to him. His entire arm is in the port now, the metal at his shoulder beginning to shred, clanging loudly in the air.

“Don’t rob me of my heroic, sacrificial end,” Kay says.

Cassian huffs. “If this is one of your lousy attempts to cheer me up, it isn’t working.”

Kay nods. “I should have been kinder to you. I know.”

“No, I…” Cassian groans. He’s had to step back, but he’s clinging so tightly to Kay’s shoulder that his broken nails and fingertip cuts from clawing at the ice covering Nerezza have reopened, leaving slivers and droplets of blood on Kay’s black metal body.

“Thank you, Cassian,” Kay says.

“Kay--”

“Let go, Cassian.”

_“Kay!”_

There’s a loud shrieking noise, the sound of shrapnel in a car wreck, a metallic splintering, a distorted groan, a brilliant light. Jyn covers her eyes, stumbling back, but she reaches out and finds a warm arm, a hand in human skin, and she tugs.

She and Cassian fall to the floor.

The light goes out.

Jyn blinks.

Kay is gone.

The control desk looks as it had as they came in.

But the door, the door leading further into the Citadel; it’s wide open.

 

* * *

 

Jyn and Cassian lie on the floor, staring at the open door.

She can’t really see anything inside it; only a long, dark tunnel of a hallway. The mysterious floor of the antechamber seems to expand in the hall, becoming the walls, a passage of a shifting midnight sky. A walk into deep space.

Cassian picks himself up, and she hastens to follow.

He looks at her, and the grief and fear in his eyes is terrible to behold.

Before she can second guess it, before she can feel ashamed or embarrassed, she reaches out, and takes his hand.

He squeezes her hand tightly in his, and she can feel his blood slide down over their entwined fingers.

“All the way,” she whispers.

He nods. “All the way.”

They step through the door.

It is a tunnel unlike any Jyn has ever walked through. The walls are shimmering, black interspersed with green, purple, blue, red, and white. It mostly reminds her of the night sky, if the sky were metallic, shifting rapidly. If the Northern Lights were a violent fixture. If staring at the sky was like looking into a nefarious abyss. If space left her feeling like she was being watched.

She walks, and she focuses on the feel of Cassian’s hand in hers, on the sound of his shallow but steady breathing.

Eventually, the tunnel ends, emerging into the bottom of the tower.

The tower is circular, the room black like the tunnel before it, stars and crescent moons glittering in the walls. There is a circular staircase to their left, spiraling up, and Jyn turns her head to follow it, seeing how it ends at the ceiling, opening into the top of the tower, and an unknown room.

Directly across from them is a mirror.

Or, what looks like a mirror.

It’s framed by white, like the thick branches growing on the outside of the Citadel. Jyn can see their reflections in it, sees how pale she is, her hair messy and ragged, the forming K-2SO tattoo on her bare forearm, her skinned knuckles.

Cassian drops her hand, and approaches the mirror.

“Cassian,” Jyn calls, frowning as he walks to it. “Come on, the stairs are this way--”

He turns around to look at her, and she loses her voice at the look on his face.

“Jyn,” he murmurs. “That isn’t me in the mirror.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> forever obsessed with the idea of what is inevitable, what has always been inevitable, and what can be changed. this will become more apparent next chapter.
> 
> Galen being the name of the doctor who coined "oncos" as a word to describe tumors is true, and a happy coincidence for this story.
> 
> the part in ANNIHILATION that really made me cry was Lena's memory of being at home with Kane, the two of them reading together in nice, companionable silence, and then the film immediately cutting to Lena absolutely SOBBING in the Shimmer. you really felt the weight of all that she had lost: Kane, her marriage, and herself. just crushing. wanted to try and tap into that with Jyn's memory of her family, cutting to her weeping in the Shimmer.
> 
> now is probably the right time to mention that the opening quotes and chapter summaries are not always exclusively indicative of that specific chapter, but the story as a whole.


	10. Annihilation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Do you know how this ends? Have you figured it out yet?”

* * *

  

_Draw a monster._

_Why is it a monster?_

\--Janice Lee, from _Daughter_

 

* * *

 

The Cassian she has entered this room with, hand in hers, is a mess. His hands are bloodier than hers, his shirt stained with dirt and sweat, the dog tags at his neck still smudged with mud. His clothes are a little ragged, forehead shiny with perspiration and anxiety.

The Cassian in the mirror is shockingly put-together. His hair is neater, his clothes smoother, his hands cleaner. He looks like he did the first day she met him, on Yavin.

She watches Cassian turn back around to face the mirror. He raises a trembling hand towards it.

As she watches, a few drops of the blood on his hand, the blood earned from trying to save Kay, fly off. They hit the mirror, and rather than land on glass, the blood lands in something like liquid, the red drops blossoming, spiraling out. Jyn’s reflection disappears in the ripples.

Cassian steps _out_ of the mirror.

His face is impassive, like it looked as he watched her in the room she woke up in on Yavin. But this Cassian, this Other Cassian, doesn’t bother to look at her. He keeps his eyes locked on his frozen, identical twin, standing in the middle of the room, ten feet away, Jyn hovering at the base of the staircase on the side.

Other Cassian steps close to his twin. Their bodies, their positions, their postures, mirror the other perfectly.

“We always knew we were going to end up here, didn’t we?” Other Cassian asks.

Her Cassian is struck speechless.

Other Cassian’s smile is cold, dark. Cruel.

“We knew if we didn’t die at the hands of a combatant, in some dark, unforgiving alley in an unknown country,” he murmurs, “That we would die at our own hands. This has always been inevitable. We’ve known it ever since Jenoport.”

Her Cassian’s face twists, haunted by a memory Jyn does not know.

For the first time, Other Cassian looks away from his twin, dark brown eyes neatly sliding to Jyn.

“I have killed everything I’ve ever touched,” he says, and his voice is so cold, colder than he’s ever spoken to her before, and Jyn gets a glimpse of the Cassian she has been warned about.

_“I have been far closer to being the person who tears out the insides of others than my sister ever has been. And I need you to remember that, Jyn.”_

“The only question is,” Other Cassian continues, “Does that end with myself? Or do I kill you, too?”

_“I care if you think poorly of Nerezza, because I know how good she is… But I care less if you think poorly of me, because I know how bad I am. You just haven’t seen it yet.”_

She trembles.

Other Cassian’s eyes slide away from her, back to his frozen twin.

“We thought we were a man,” he says. “But we were never really _sure,_ were we? What kind of man commits the crimes we have? But if we weren’t a man, what were we? Here, in the Shimmer, now: _what_ _are we?”_

For the first time, her Cassian speaks.

“I’m you,” he says. “You’re me.”

Other Cassian smiles, and he is terrifying and wicked and beautiful.

“And you can’t bear it,” he murmurs. “You never have. You never will.”

Cassian turns away from his cruel twin, turning to Jyn, still stuck at the bottom of the staircase.

“Climb the stairs, Jyn,” he says.

She blanches. “I can’t leave you here--”

“You can,” he says, and she thinks there should be force in his voice, but there is only sorrow. Only resignation. “And you will. Because he’s right. I was always going to end up here. I was always going to kill myself. I see it now. This is why I walked into the Shimmer.”

“Cassian,” she whispers.

He smiles at her in the gloom.

“Go, Jyn,” he says. “I’ll see you on the other side. I’ll find you.”

And in a move so quick she almost misses it, he lifts his rifle, and shoots his other self.

The bullet embeds itself in his Other’s chest, the left side, where the heart is. But the Other Cassian only looks down at it, at the hole oozing black, metallic, starlit blood, and then he looks back up. His expression is close to disappointed.

“When have bullets ever stopped us?” he asks.

Her Cassian nods, and tosses the rifle aside carelessly.

“Run, Jyn,” he says, and then he throws a punch at his twin.

She’s already sprinting up the stairs.

 

* * *

 

She gets glimpses of the strange fight happening at the bottom of the tower as she climbs the stairs.

It is a perfectly even fight, with the Cassians mirroring the other, stopping punches and landing punches in sync. Cassian’s style is obviously clean and neat, quick and fierce, but she sees him breaking down as his double copies him, the fight turning dirty, becoming a knockdown, beat-up drag.

She pushes herself faster.

The quicker she gets the plans, the quicker she can return to Cassian.

Perhaps she can think of a way to help him.

But even as she climbs, she knows she won’t be able to do so.

The bear that killed Baze was impervious to the bullets fired by Cassian and Kay; it only died when he did. The machine that sucked Kay in was unhindered by Cassian and Jyn’s efforts; it only stopped once Kay was gone.

She suspects that Other Cassian won’t stop until her Cassian does, and she suspects only then will he die.

When they both do.

The thought rocks her.

But she buries her grief, her sorrow, into the center of her chest, to unearth later.

She cannot deal with it now.

She never has.

She reaches the top of the tower.

There’s a door at the top of the stairs, a door with a single window. Brilliant white light is coming through this window, obscuring whatever might be inside. Jyn stands in front of the door for a moment, and tries to gather herself together, to steel herself, for what might be waiting on the other side.

But she knows; there is no way to prepare for the Shimmer.

She opens the door.

The room is circular, like the base of the tower. Windows line the walls, looking out over the blue ocean and the rest of Scarif, everything bathed in the multitude of colors of the Shimmer. From this perspective at the top of the tower, she can see the glass trees on the beach, the flowers overwhelming the forest, the glowing waves lapping at the shore, the dark blue ocean stretching endlessly beyond.

_This is a lighthouse,_ she realizes.

It is beautiful.

And then she turns her head.

There’s a skeleton on the side of the room. It’s sitting, cross legged, back against the wall, head turned down, a single, jagged sliver of direct sunlight brushing it. In its hands, it holds the remains of some kind of grenade, a grenade that has caused a closed explosion. Black smoke stains cover the wall and floor around the body.

Slowly, Jyn approaches it.

There is something shining in the ash in front of the skeleton’s feet, half-buried in the gray. She steps closer, bending down to get a better look.

Her breath catches.

A kyber crystal winks at her in the sunlight.

She falls to her knees, looking into the skull before her.

“Papa,” she croaks.

The realization, the recognition, threatens to yank her down into the ash at his decayed feet.

Here, at last; she’s found him.

After a decade. After a lifetime. Here he is.

And she’s too late.

Her hands flutter uselessly in the air, desperate to touch, desperate to reach, desperate to save. But she is looking only at bones and residue. There is nothing left to save. There is nothing left for her here.

Except…

She turns her head.

There’s another control desk, on the side of the room, not unlike the one in the antechamber. She manages to get up, and stumbles to the desk, collapsing in the metal chair before it. Hesitantly, she reaches out, and presses a button.

The screen lights up.

A green cursor flashes.

And that’s it.

Nothing more.

She looks at the keyboard.

With no other idea, she types: D E A T H  S T A R.

She hits return.

The screen spasms for a moment, and then returns to the blank screen, the single green cursor. The control desk does nothing more.

She tries again.

T H E  S T A R.

The same thing happens.

Jyn closes her eyes, rests her arms on the desk before her, and lays her head on them.

_I’m so close,_ she thinks. The plans are in this computer, somewhere within. But technology, and hacking into technology; it isn’t Jyn’s forte. She’s a biologist. Her technological expertise begins and ends with microscopes, Bunsen burners, test tubes. She’s proud when she can successfully operate the classroom computer and projector without needing to call tech support. She has never hacked into anything in her life, and never planned to. Kay and Cassian were supposed to handle this part.

Out of options, she reaches for the kyber crystal at her neck, and wraps her hand around it.

_Help me,_ she prays. _Please. Anyone._

“Jyn.”

She stills.

Slowly, she sits up, and turns around.

She is no longer alone in the room.

A teenage girl, perhaps thirteen years old, sits next to the skeleton of Galen, between him and the black duffel bag he likely brought with him to the tower. The girl is twirling something in her hands, and Jyn recognizes it as a grenade, identical to the one Galen must have used. But the girl’s eyes are not on the grenade; they’re up, turned to Jyn. They are big, and green, and hers.

Because the girl is hers.

She’s her.

Over two decades ago.

Other Jyn’s face is dispassionate, lips pursed. She sits in a position identical to their dead father’s.

“This is all our fault, you know,” she says.

Jyn swallows, throat very dry. “It isn’t.”

“Isn’t it?” Other Jyn shrugs. She is put-together, clean, like Other Cassian had been. Jyn feels very small next to her younger self’s hard gaze, even though this Jyn is physically smaller than her. “He did all this for us, you know. Because we asked him to save the world. And he thought he could. For us.”

Tears slide down Jyn’s cheeks, leaving murky trails. Other Jyn is less than impressed.

“But it didn’t work out that way,” Other Jyn says. “He killed a city, instead. And half a dozen soldiers. An anthropologist. A paramedic. A physicist. An FBI agent.” Her eyes slide up to Jyn. “One last soldier downstairs, at this very moment.”

Jyn closes her eyes.

“But he couldn’t kill us.”

“What?” Jyn croaks, opening her eyes. Her other self has turned her face to the skeleton next to her.

“He couldn’t bear to kill us,” she murmurs, and Jyn watches as she stretches a hand out, brushing their father’s cheek. Or what remains of it. “I reminded him that he had to. Because the Star; he named it for us, you know. So to kill it, he had to kill us. You. Me. His daughter. And he couldn’t do it. And he couldn’t live with himself, knowing how close he’d come, how his doomsday machine would live on, impossible to kill. Because how many can navigate the Shimmer, truly? How many bodies litter this island? If the creator of the Shimmer cannot survive it, then how can anyone else? And how can the creator live on after that, with all that guilt and grief?”

Other Jyn drops her hand to the floor, scooping up a handful of ash. She watches it slide through her fingers, and then she looks up at Jyn again.

“Sometimes, immolation is the mere act of giving up,” she says.

And Jyn cannot bear it.

She sobs.

She buries her face in her hands, and she weeps.

She weeps for her long-dead mother. She weeps for Chirrut, and his bright blue eyes. She weeps for Baze, and his warm smile. She weeps for Bodhi, and his fragile self. She weeps for Kay, and his sacrifice.

She weeps for Cassian, and the horrors that brought him to his inevitable death, on the floor below.

“We’re all just cells,” Other Jyn says in her smooth teenaged voice. “Nature’s mistake. We attack each other. We attack ourselves. We live, we burn, we die. The Shimmer takes this in, takes us in, and refracts us back out. We are composite sketches of everything we love and hate, and it returns the things we carry back to us. And no one can bear that. No one can face their fears. No one can relive their past. No one can escape themselves. No one knows how to escape themselves. No one knows how to live with themselves, when they see how monstrous they are.” She studies her older self.

“Do you know?” she wonders. “Do you know how this ends? Have you figured it out yet?”

Jyn shakes her head, hands clutching the sides of it, trying to block out her Other self, her younger self’s horrible words, the pain threatening to claw through her chest, inside out. The emotional agony, the grief, the guilt, the horror, the loss, the trauma.

The Shimmer, taking it all in, refracting it back to her.

She hears the voices of the others who have died on this island, in the Shimmer.

_“Everything I do, I do to protect you. Do you understand?”_

_“Grief, and loss, and trauma. It warps the edges of our very individual realities.”_

_“Isn’t self-destruction coded into us? In our cells?”_

_“What I would say, if I could see Chirrut again. I love you, and I am sorry.”_

_“When I came in here, I thought I wanted to find absolution. I thought I wanted to be redeemed. But the more I see, the more I… feel, I’ve come to realize; I don’t want to be saved. I never have.”_

_“Orson Krennic wants to destroy the world. Galen Erso wants to save it. What do you want, Dr. Erso?”_

Jyn opens her eyes.

_“That’s what I’ll do when I’m grown up, then. Touch the stars.”_

_“And? What else will you do?”_

_“Help you save the world.”_

She looks at her Other self.

“I want to save the world,” Jyn says. “I want to destroy the weapon.”

“And what is the weapon?”

_Her father’s smile is still warm, but there’s a haze in his eyes she does not understand._

_“Okay, Stardust,” he murmurs, and pulls her down to kiss her cheek. “We will save the world.”_

But Jyn is already turning, reaching for the keyboard.

S T A R D U S T.

“It’s me,” she says, and she hits _enter._

The computer rumbles, and then in a surprisingly anticlimactic move, it ejects a flashdrive.

It’s small, a thumb drive, and she pulls it from its port. The thing is thin, gray metal, and looks very unimposing for the information it contains.

“Papa couldn’t destroy the weapon,” she murmurs, turning back to her Other self, who is watching her steadily, still sitting so calmly on the floor. “Because it’s me. But I can do it.”

Sometimes, immolation is the mere act of giving up.

Sometimes, in order to save the world, you must destroy yourself.

All those things you hate about yourself. All those things you love about yourself.

Sometimes, you press stop.

And then restart.

Sometimes, coming back from the trauma means recreating yourself.

Becoming something new.

Jyn Erso, biologist; she’s been studying life. She’s been studying how beings rebuild from the ground-up. She’s looked at cell structures, and found the holes, the features and the bugs, and she’s been trying to recreate her own emotional state to mirror that of something less drawn to departed family. Something that can stand on its own.

Other Jyn watches as Jyn crosses the room, thumb drive safely tucked into her pants pocket. She kneels in front of her father’s skeleton, and digs his kyber crystal out of the ash. It glints in the light of the Shimmer, warm and welcoming.

_Just a shiny rock,_ she thinks.

And a reminder that the Ersos, separated and fractured, still love one another.

But, perhaps: not themselves.

Perhaps that has always been the curse of Galen, Lyra, and Jyn; perhaps they were all always their own, their only thing. Perhaps they could only gravitate. Perhaps they were never meant to co-exist for long.

Jyn thinks her life has been an experiment in solitude and waiting. She’s ready to end it.

She puts the crystal in her pocket.

She turns to her younger self.

“Are you going to fight me?” she asks.

“I’ve never wanted to fight you,” Other Jyn replies.

She’s only ever wanted to fight her father. His work. Maybe the world, even.

But herself?

She won’t fight her.

But she will destroy her, that girl she used to be, that girl she has clung to all these years.

She’ll save the world.

Jyn takes the grenade from her Other’s hand.

“See you,” she says.

Her Other smiles.

“Do you know what you all have in common?” she asks. “The soldiers who entered this island? The group of scientists that followed?” At Jyn’s blank look, she says, “You are all so desperate to be anyone other than yourselves. How tragic that is. How horrified you are, by your reflections, seen in the less forgiving light of this place.”

Jyn’s breath catches.

“What becomes of you, after this?” Her younger self asks. “What happens to you, when the world finds out what your father has done? When everyone knows what his DNA is capable of? What will they think of you, daughter of a terrorist? Child of a madman? His last descendant? What will they think of _you?_ Or do you already know?”

And she does know.

“They’ll hate me,” Jyn says. “For all of those reasons.”

Her Other’s smile is sad. “They can join your club. The world united against you, and you against you. Is there any reason to go back? The world will shame you. You’ll lose everything. You are already cursed. Stay here, and make your own future. You could learn so much about biology, nature, life, evolution. Right here. No one will stop you. Stay with Papa. Stay with me.”

And Jyn smiles.

“I know,” she says. “But I have to go back. I still have to get the plans to someone who can destroy the weapon.”

To her surprise, Other Jyn nods.

“So,” she says. “You do have a reason to go back.”

Chirrut and Baze, their shared grief over their lost daughter.

Bodhi, his depression.

Kay, the cancer eating him from the inside out.

Cassian, his self-hatred and guilt.

And her. Daughter of a terrorist. Complicit in his fall. Indifferent to his cruelty. Desperate to save him. She, who would try to redeem a monster. She, who told him to save the world, and saw weapons of annihilation built in her name.

She, who ushered in the existence of the terror, driving him with her own anger and grief.

It is hard, Jyn thinks, to save the world when you do not want to save yourself.

But it is frighteningly easy to save the world when it means destroying yourself.

For some, they have only been waiting for the luxury of the excuse.

Her younger self blinks at her, and she gazes back, these two creations of Galen Erso.

“And I have to destroy you,” Jyn says.

And it is easy to destroy yourself when you have already done so, long ago.

When the teenage girl in the airport watched her father walk away, and knew she would never be the same. When she fought that girl, fought to evolve past her, fought to live without love, fought to live as her own thing, for better or for worse. Jyn has fought to destroy that girl, to let go, to evolve in to who she is now, to evolve so she could finally meet the thing wearing her face.

The Shimmer blinks at her, familiar green eyes shining with a foreign sheen. She looks like a ghost. She looks like the being that dwells in the back of Jyn’s mind. She looks like every nightmare she has ever had. She looks like a memory. She looks like the worst of Galen Erso.

She looks like her reflection.

Jyn says, “You mean that? You don’t want to fight me?”

“I’m you,” the Shimmer replies. “I only want to fight you as much as you want to fight yourself.”

Jyn nods.

“Your father couldn’t bear to destroy his two creations,” the Shimmer muses. “Most people, I thought, would have a hard time destroying themselves. It’s counter, isn’t it? Do humans not have a survival instinct? Most creatures do.”

“Usually. But for some of us: not if it means saving the world.”

The Shimmer considers this.

“What if I’d taken the form of your father?” it wonders. “What then?”

“Destroying my father would have hurt more,” Jyn acknowledges.

“I didn’t think it would,” the Shimmer says. “Considering how mixed your feelings are toward him. You seemed to hate him. For what he’d created. For me. For the weapon he built. For leaving you alone, all these years. For being a poor father.”

Jyn thinks about it.

“I think, sometimes, people hate themselves more than they hate most others,” she muses.

“There was no one our father hated more than himself,” the Shimmer replies. “No one he loved more than he hated himself.”

“Yes. But I love him more than I hate myself.”

“How strange.”

Jyn smiles. “I guess humanity is still a thing that cannot be programmed.”

“Your robot friend proves it,” the Shimmer says. “I didn’t think there was a difference between self-sacrifice and self-destruction. I have a kill switch, after all. It never occurred to me that I could choose to switch it. I thought it was only annihilation.”

“Annihilation is total defeat,” Jyn murmurs. “But I don’t think total defeat is always annihilation.”

They look at each other.

The Shimmer’s smile on her face is dark. “Next time, then.”

Jyn’s answering smile is just as dark. “You and I both know there won’t be a next time.”

The Shimmer considers.

“Maybe, Jyn Erso.”

Jyn reaches out, and takes the Shimmer’s hand. It is cold and hard, but thrumming under the skin, like a data processor, or a heartbeat. She wraps the Shimmer’s fingers around the grenade, and then hers around the Shimmer’s, and the two of them stay like that, eyes locked on the other, the past and the future colliding, and refracting.

Jyn looks into her own eyes.

“For what it’s worth,” she says, and she does not know who she is addressing, if it is the Shimmer, or Galen, or herself. Or all three. Or none at all. “I love you. And I forgive you.”

It is frighteningly easy to save the world when it means destroying yourself.

And it is terrifyingly easy to destroy when it means destroying yourself.

And, sometimes: self-destruction acts as a catalyst.

She pulls the pin, and jumps to her feet. She sprints across the room.

She slams the door closed.

The grenade is not a grenade as Jyn knows it. It goes off, erupting in brilliant white flame, and the flame catches on the Shimmer’s clothes, the grenade still clutched in her hands. Jyn watches her twin hold the grenade close, phosphorous flames reflected in shimmering green eyes, even as the fire catches, spreading over the Shimmer, catching on the wall behind her, approaching the bag filled with similar grenades next to her.

(And, sometimes: the event catalyzed is not annihilation.)

(But not always.)

Jyn turns away.

The tower trembles as the bag explodes.

 

* * *

 

Jyn runs down the stairs.

The tower is shaking, but she doesn’t think it’s shaking due to significant structural damage. She thinks it’s shaking because a grenade has exploded in the hands of the Shimmer, causing the rest of the Shimmer, the dome formed around the island, to quake as it dies in brilliant phosphorus light.

She’s panting, running on adrenaline and fear, and nearly trips. She catches herself, winding down the staircase, reaching the bottom floor.

There are two Cassians lying there, little bits of ember, flame, and ash falling from the ceiling down to them.

One Cassian lies on his stomach, eyes open and empty, neck twisted at an impossible angle. His knuckles are broken and bruised, bloody and raw, clothes bedraggled. His head is turned to the side, stars reflecting off his skin.

The other Cassian lies on his back, his feet to his twin’s head, the two of them sprawled like a yin and yang symbol. His eyes are also open, but clear, blinking sluggishly at the top of the tower, at how the black, starlit walls are shaking and spinning, the colors moving frantically in death throes.

Jyn walks to the two Cassians.

To the live one, she asks, “Are you Cassian?”

He blinks up at her. “I think so.”

The dog tags hanging from his neck are stained with mud.

“Are you Jyn?” he asks.

His light-colored shirt is slightly torn, left shoulder and the top of his chest exposed, and Jyn can see a hazy tattoo of blue and purple stars on his brown skin.

Her tears are cold on her flushed cheeks.

“I think so,” she whispers.

“Good,” he murmurs.

“Can you stand?”

Cassian shifts, wincing. “He, uh. Tripped me up. When I tripped him up. Something’s wrong with my leg. I’m not sure.”

Jyn squares her shoulders, and bends. She throws Cassian’s arm around her shoulders, wrapping her arm around his waist. With the last of her strength, a strength she didn’t know she had, she heaves, and pulls him up with her. They both gasp at the movement; Jyn at the weight, Cassian at the pain.

“Did you get the plans?” Cassian asks, voice slightly slurred.

They begin to hobble down the tunnel, which is whirling rapidly. Stars and supernovas, moons and eclipses, space and time. A wormhole.

“I did,” Jyn grunts.

“What was at the top of the tower?”

“My father,” Jyn says. “Dead. Dead for a while, I think. And, uh. Me.”

“You,” Cassian echoes.

Jyn nods. “But not quite me. But also me. The Shimmer, you know?”

“What did she say?”

She can’t quite shrug with the way she’s carrying Cassian, but she tries anyway. “Nothing I didn’t already know.”

Cassian nods. His cheek is cut, blood blossoming out of it like tears.

“Yeah,” he mumbles. “He didn’t say anything I didn’t know, either.”

“You’re not what you think you are, Cassian,” Jyn says, shuffling as rapidly as she can. The tower is still shaking, and the lights of the tunnel are flickering, and she wants to get out of here.

“I am exactly what I think I am,” Cassian murmurs. “But in there… I figured out the only way to defeat him. Me. The person I am.”

She frowns. “How?”

“He mirrored me,” he says. “My every move. Because I was fighting myself. So, as soon as I stopped… He stopped too. And we were stuck. We looked at each other. I saw my grief, my guilt, my hatred, reflected back at me. I saw everything. The past, and the future. So I changed it.”

“Okay…”

He glances at her, and he smiles.

“I stopped fighting,” he says. “I embraced him. He didn’t know what to do. I told him that I was going to try and forgive him, and there was only one way to do that. I broke his neck.”

Blood bubbles out of the corner of his mouth, and Jyn knows he’s bleeding internally.

“That part of me has to die, before I can start forgiving it,” he finishes.

They reach the end of the tunnel, emerging into the antechamber. Both Jyn and Cassian glance at the control desk, but there is still no sign of Kay. They weren’t really expecting one.

They stumble to the door, and Jyn shoves it open.

Hazy, refracted, trembling sunlight hits them.

“Is there a word,” Cassian mumbles, leaning more heavily on Jyn as they stagger outside. “For when you kill your own doppelganger? But the doppelganger is just the same as you? Is there a word, or do we just call it suicide?”

“There’s a word,” Jyn says.

The forest is on fire, the flowers burning up in a blaze of arson, sucking up the tumors, like a long ago Egyptian scientist had attempted with a fire drill. The glass trees are fountains of flame, spitting into the sky, raining ashes onto the sand. Light zigs and zags around them. The tattoo on Jyn’s arm seems to burn.

She smiles at it all, and turns to Cassian with that same, annihilating grin.

“We call it self-destruction.”

 

* * *

 

They collapse on the wet sand, at the edge of the ocean.

The Shimmer burns behind them, and around them.

Cassian clings to her hand, and then groans, keeling over. She grabs his shoulders, leaning over him nervously, and carefully navigates his torso so his head is in her lap, and he’s looking up at her through blurry, pain-filled eyes.

His hand brushes the small of her back, where her shirt has ridden up.

“Jyn,” he mumbles. “You’ve got a crescent moon on your back.”

Her laugh is thin, but true. “Of course I do.”

Cassian’s tattoo, imprinted on her.

“I’ve got your stars,” he mumbles.

“I know,” she confirms.

“Your stars in my lungs,” he says, eyes blinking slowly. “Stars on my ribs. I think you’re trapped in me now, and I think I’ll always be trapped in you. Stars and moons… We were on the walls of that tower…”

“I saw,” she murmurs.

She grips Cassian’s hand in hers.

“If they’re monitoring the island like they should be,” Jyn says, voice firm. “Then they’ll see the Shimmer collapsing. They’ll come find us.”

She can’t even wait to see Draven’s irritated face.

“Tell ‘em where Chirrut is,” Cassian murmurs. “Baze. Ezza. I dunno about Bodhi, or Kay, but the others…”

“Tell them yourself,” Jyn says, swallowing her tears.

Cassian’s eyes slide away from hers, blinking up at the sky overhead.

“So many stars,” he says.

She follows his gaze.

Without the Shimmer, the night sky is clear. Impossibly black, endless, abyssal. Stars and satellites shine brightly overhead, winking and twinkling sporadically. It’s almost dizzying, how many there are. With no light pollution, Jyn can see the Milky Way. And maybe a galaxy or two, but that could be a trick of her eyes.

“Nice to die under so many stars,” Cassian says.

She looks down at him.

He’s looking at her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Sometimes, immolation is the mere act of giving up" is a line lifted from Film Crit Hulk's AMAZING essay on ANNIHILATION: ["Annihilation and the Horrors of Change".](https://filmcrithulk.blog/2018/02/27/annihilation-the-horrors-of-change) I agree with the whole thing, and it really helped me gather my own thoughts about the movie.
> 
> Cassian's short speech about seeing the past and the future, and choosing to change it, was cobbled together from LOOPER [2012].
> 
> "I think you're trapped in me / I think I'll be trapped in you" inspired by a similar line in an early draft of ANNIHILATION.
> 
> i will be posting the final chapter/epilogue of this story on Sunday, so if there's anything you want clarified/answered, let me know! last chance!
> 
> [I feel like I should maybe clarify/remind: when asked what happened to Cassian, in the opening scene of this story, Jyn says, "I don't know." Not "he's dead" or "gone". She says "I don't know."]


	11. For Those That Follow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Come back to me.”

* * *

 

_You have overcome yourself: but why do you show yourself to me only as the one overcome?_

_I_ _want to see the victor cast roses into the abyss, and say,_

_“Here is my thanks to the monster,_

_because it did not know how to swallow me!”_

\--Friedrich Nietzsche, from _Posthumous Works_

 

* * *

 

_“Jyn. Please. Tell us what you remember.”_

 

* * *

 

Her debrief is mercifully short.

She thinks it’s because they don’t know what questions to ask. She thinks it’s because she doesn’t have any comprehensible answers.

The Shimmer. The Citadel. The Tower.

Missing time. Shark teeth in an octopus corpse. Tattoos copied onto other forms. Human teeth behind a bear’s tongue. A man’s mangled scream. Shifting organs. A stopped heartbeat. Blood on impossible ice. Flowers out of skin. Reflections.

“What did it do to you?” Agent Mothma asks.

She shrugs.

“Nothing we hadn’t already done to ourselves,” she says. “Nothing we weren’t going to do.”

Draven and Mothma exchange a look.

Jyn traces the _O_ on her arm. Part of her had thought the tattoo would fade as the Shimmer did, but it hasn’t. And she’s still got the crescent moon on her back, along with the outline of a moon, unfilled, on her shoulder, opposite to her stars.

The Shimmer refracted her, and so the pieces of her, this composite sketch of a human, will remain as they are.

“What did it want?” Draven asks.

“I’m not sure it _wanted_ anything,” Jyn says. “But if I had to guess; I think it wanted me. Us. It wanted to make us all into something new.”

Draven and Mothma exchange another look.

They end her debrief pretty quickly after that.

She goes to the medical wing.

Cassian lies still on his bed. Unlike her tattooed stars, the stars on his chest are not in a clear constellation; it is not Lyra, or Cancer, or Orion, or Taurus, or anything recognizable. It is a cacophony of blue and purple stars, sharp and dark.

She’s got a couple of Cassian’s moons on her back, but as Cassian had noted, it runs deeper than that.

She’s got him in her spine. In her lungs. Embedded in her heart.

Her fear and her grief for him: crystallized, made physical. If they were to cut her open, they’d find his name on her ribs. His smile behind her knee. His eyes lingering near her clavicle.

She’s got parts of Kay, Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze too, even more obvious, just as anchoring, ghosting over her skin.

Kay’s ink on her radius. A couple of Bodhi’s scars skirting her elbows. A hint of Chirrut’s blue in the green irises of her eyes. Errant dark curls copied from Baze, winding around her own thin brown hair.

Because she’s still got the Shimmer in her.

She sees it, when she looks at herself in the mirror. She sees a ring of purple, green, blue, black, and yellow around the iris of her eye. In a certain light, her skin glows. No matter how many times she washes her hands, blood and ashes still dot her knuckles. She will always be like this.

But she is not alone in it.

Mothma and Draven had only shortly questioned her on the fates of Kay, Baze, Chirrut, and Bodhi. She had given a straightforward _Dead_ to the question of Chirrut and Baze, but Bodhi and Kay were harder to quantify. Bodhi disappeared. Kay was swallowed.

And Cassian…

He passed out on the beach, as the Shimmer died around them, as they waited for rescue. And rescue did come, within the hour, a squad of grim-faced soldiers heavily armed, Draven at the head. He wasted no time in interrogating Jyn, in asking what was wrong with Cassian, how he had come to be so severely injured, with injuries characteristic of a brutal hand-to-hand fight with an astonishingly well-trained and lethal opponent. She could not come up with a satisfactory explanation, an explanation that was not the truth, the truth being:

_It was him. Those injuries, those wounds; they could only come from his own hand._

So she shook her head, and chose ignorance and muteness.

The muteness felt less like a choice when she returned to Yavin, and saw the nervous eyes of the soldiers and scientists, saw the way Draven eyed her, saw how Mothma’s smile was less warm and more uneasy.

The changes that had slowly settled into her on Scarif hit like a wrecking ball on Yavin.

She sat stiffly in the chair in the interrogation room, and choked on the truth.

And Cassian slept on.

He was stable, the doctors insisted. His vitals were improving. The internal bleeding had stopped.

There was no discernable reason for his unconsciousness.

Still: he sleeps.

Now, she sits next to Cassian, and takes his hand.

Stardust colors his eyelids.

“Wake up,” she says. “Come back to me.”

 

* * *

 

She is unsurprised to learn they were in the Shimmer for two months, and not the matter of days that she had thought.

She charges up her long-dead cell phone, and finds her voicemail is filled with messages from Saw Gerrera, the only person she knows who would think to check up on her. His first message details how he was apprehended on his train to Connecticut by FBI agents asking about Galen, and how he was detained for questioning, and ultimately let go. His messages decline in calmness after that, filled with worry and concern, demanding Jyn call him immediately, noting that Johns Hopkins says she is taking a _leave of absence for a special assignment,_ and he’s scared.

Jyn calls him.

She cannot tell him much about her time away, so she comes up with a story that has bits of the truth scattered within it. She tells him Galen was involved with the Empire, that the government thought Jyn might be able to decipher some of his work, with her knowledge of his studies and her knowledge of him as a person. She tells Saw that Galen is dead.

He takes the news more easily than she expected.

Perhaps, like her, he had resigned himself to Galen’s death long ago, had known the final goodbye would never come.

She promises to visit him in New Haven on her next long weekend, and then they hang up.

 

* * *

 

She is surprised, and horrified, to learn the entire country of Alderaan was destroyed during the time she was in the Shimmer.

A peaceful country, filled with beautiful mountain ranges and crystalline lakes, on the coast of South America; annihilated in one blast from the Death Star. Millions of voices crying out in a single moment of terror, and so rapidly extinguished.

She’s at home, eating dinner, when the U.S. government announces that an attack, involving several countries, has successfully destroyed the Death Star. The Empire is on the run, multiple governments and international intelligence agencies looking to apprehend it and everyone involved.

A young woman in white, dark brown hair curled around her head in a traditional Alderaanian style, announces that the legacy of her lost country will be to inspire hope in all those who need it.

“Hope,” she says, in a surprisingly deep voice, “can always be found in other people. And so, even as Alderaan is physically gone; it will endure. As the last of the royal house of Organa, I pledge myself to that ideal. In the name of Alderaan, and hope, we will walk forward with grace.”

Jyn puts her fork down.

For the first time since Scarif, she lets herself cry.

 

* * *

 

As the Shimmer had predicted--as _Jyn_ had predicted--the news of Galen Erso’s treachery and terrorism makes a pariah of his daughter.

She meets with the dean at Johns Hopkins, a nice man who hems and haws, who talks about _reputations_ and _ethics_ and _beliefs_ , and the writing is not so much on the wall as it is on the paperwork, and Jyn signs her resignation letter without too much hassle or anger.

She understands.

Galen Erso is a once-in-a-generation terror.

Jyn Erso is left to deal, and be, the fallout.

Jyn Erso is left to lose everything.

But the U.S. government takes pity on her, likely only because she was so critical to the theft of the Death Star plans, to the destruction of the Shimmer on Scarif, and so she opens her door one evening and is immediately handed a thick packet of documents by none other than Davits Draven.

“What’s this?” she asks, flicking it open.

It’s the past, and the future.

A birth certificate, noting the birth of Liana Lyra Hallik, to a couple of lawyers in Birmingham, England. Passports affirming citizenship of the United Kingdom and United States belonging to Liana. Glowing references and recommendation letters. A detailed work history from the State Department. A foreign bank account number. A one-way plane ticket to London.

“Oh,” she says.

“Yes,” Draven says. “We thought Jyn Erso might be interested in disappearing.”

She takes the documents.

For the last time, she destroys Jyn Erso.

 

* * *

 

The new term at UCL begins amidst the cold of January.

She bundles up, in sweaters and long-sleeved thermal shirts, and so none of her students see the hazy _O_ tattoo on her forearm. She doesn’t think any of them would ask, but she knows at some point someone will, and she has to come up with a plausible reason for having such an odd thing.

She studies the tattoo, running her fingers over it, and then she’s struck by inspiration.

She goes to a tattoo parlor near the university, and finds an artist who turns the _O_ into an ouroboros.

She does not get any colored ink, choosing to stick with black. It’s fairly small, since the _O_ was only about as tall as the width of her forearm, and so she gets the tattoo duplicated, then connected to the other by linked lines of ink. She also gets it thickened, and enlarged, to make sure there is enough space to add a few carefully chosen details to the skin of the snake that is the ouroboros.

An albatross, flying on one side, wings spread.

A sleeping bear on the other side.

Flowers skirting the edges of the tattoo.

A tiny _K-2SO_ like a trademark sign.

A moon and a star, at the center of the ouroboros.

A little bit of infinity, on her arm forever.

Carrying Rogue One with her, everywhere she goes.

 

* * *

 

The snow is falling, and she’s in her office, grading essays and drinking her weight in coffee, when there’s a knock at her door.

“Come in,” she calls, not bothering to look up.

They’re at the midway point of the term, and students are coming to her with questions about midterms, thesis papers, final essays. Jyn is kinder to them all now than she may used to have been. She is kinder in general, now, she thinks. To herself, even, and what an odd thing that is.

The door opens, and closes, and only then does she look up.

Cassian stands in front of her, snowflakes drying in his dark hair, black jacket buttoned up to his neck, hands in his pockets. His smile is small, and hesitant, but as familiar to her as the tattoos she wears.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” she replies, and Cassian sits in the chair on the other side of her desk.

“I hope this is okay,” he says, glancing around her office. It’s messy, because it’s always messy, textbooks and journals and spare pens and hairbands lying all over the place. She winces at the sight of dirty coffee mugs stacked on top of empty to-go boxes. Cassian turns back to her, and if he finds the mess alarming, he doesn’t show it.

“I should have called,” he says.

She nods. “You should have.”

“I’m sure you’re busy--”

“No, Cassian,” she interjects. “You should have called as soon as you got released from the hospital.”

It’s been months.

He nods.

“You’re right,” he acknowledges.

“I know I am.”

He smiles, their conversation in the forest mirrored back to them now. It feels like it happened years ago, rather than months.

“I’ve been, um, discharged,” he says, and at her frown, he clarifies, “From the military. No longer deemed fit for active duty. It’s for the best. I am… I couldn’t do what I used to do. Not anymore.”

“Oh.”

“So, I thought I would come and see you,” he says. “See how you’re doing. With everything.”

“I’m okay,” Jyn says, and he nods again.

“Good. Good.”

She stirs her coffee, watching as Cassian looks at his hands. He is a far cry from the intense, confident soldier who had eyed her in her room on Yavin. Now, he’s a little shaky, a thousand times more hesitant. When he looks at her, she sees a faint sheen of shimmering green in his brown eyes.

“Cassian,” she says. “My last class ends at four. There’s a great Chinese place two blocks from here. I was thinking of getting dinner there. Would you like to join me?”

He stares at her.

And then he smiles, as bright as the death of the Shimmer.

“Yes,” he says. “I’d like that, Jyn.”

“It’s Liana, now.”

He blinks.

“Not to me.”

 

* * *

 

They fall into a routine.

Cassian is living and working out of Washington, but they switch off on making the flight across the pond at least once a month. He takes her out to Arlington, and shows her the grave of Gabriel Andor, and the new grave of Nerezza Andor.

“They found her on Scarif,” he tells her, voice quiet and small. “Just lying in a field. They wanted to do an autopsy, but I managed to talk them out of it. The Shimmer killed her. Or she killed herself. Or maybe it’s the same thing. I don’t know. She’s dead, either way.”

Jyn squeezes his hand.

The bodies of Chirrut Imwe and Baze Malbus were also recovered, and Cassian tracks them down, finds their plot in a cemetery in the Virginia countryside. Kira Imwe-Malbus shares their space. Jyn leaves a bouquet of lavender and white roses.

The bodies of Bodhi Rook and Kay Tuesso were never found.

“You know Bodhi grew up in London,” Cassian tells her one day, sitting on Jyn’s couch. “But it turns out his parents immigrated to the U.K. from Jedha. Bodhi grew up spending his summers there. And his parents were visiting family in NiJedha when it was destroyed.”

Jedha had always been a surprising choice for a weapons test, and now Jyn wonders if the Empire found out that it was Bodhi Rook who had stolen away with Galen Erso’s critical information on the Death Star, and retaliated by annihilating his parents and the city they grew up in. She thinks of Bodhi’s sad eyes, how resigned he became in the Shimmer, how it picked and poked at his shame and grief.

With his family gone, he didn’t have a reason to survive the Shimmer.

And there would have been no one to claim his body.

Kay’s parents took the news of their only child’s death painfully well. Cassian tells her that he’d expected them to react with near indifference, based off his experiences with them, growing up next door. Kay’s robot-like composure and nature were things he learned from his parents.

“Guess we all do become our parents,” Cassian murmurs, and Jyn knows he’s thinking of his dead soldier father.

Cassian follows in his father’s steps, in his own way.

Like his father, he uses his work history from the U.S. Army, and finds a position at a U.S. Embassy, living and working in his wife’s birth country. Life in London is not too different from life in Washington, though it is less humid, and less snowy. He tells Jyn he has seen more than enough snow and ice for a lifetime.

He had told her, on Scarif, that she would not be able to follow him after the island, that where he was going was not a place for following. And he was right, in a small sense; in that it was Cassian who was going to do the following.

Before he confronted himself in the Shimmer, he turned to her, and said, _“I’ll see you on the other side. I’ll find you.”_

And he did.

Here, on this other side, the other side of the Shimmer, the other side of _them,_ the other side of everything.

The desire to find Jyn was what made him survive. It was what made him want to leave the Shimmer. It was a reason to go back.

Jyn likes to think if she has become her parents, she’s become the better parts of them.

Her mother’s drive and sense of adventure. Her father’s brilliance and work ethic.

Her own desire to keep loved ones close.

Cassian kisses the crescent moon on her back, and runs his fingers over the ouroboros on her arm.

“I was scared,” he tells her. “That how I… How I felt about you was only due to the Shimmer. Messing with my mind, my instincts. But the more I have thought about what happened, what we saw on the island; it was only taking what was already there. So, perhaps… It did make me want to stay close to you.”

She lies still, and listens to him breathe.

“It made me want to be with you in there,” he murmurs. “But I think… I think I choose to love you, out here.”

She traces the stars on his chest.

“It isn’t the same as yours,” he says, watching her. The full moon slants in through the skylight in Jyn’s bedroom, turning everything celestial, the sheets, the blankets, their bodies. “Yours is the constellation Lyra, but mine isn’t. I consulted an astronomer, and he couldn’t identify what constellation it is. He said it was one he’d never seen before.”

“It’s nice,” Jyn says, looking at the deep blues and dark purples of the black stars on his skin.

He catches her hand.

“It’s you, Jyn.”

He presses a kiss to her knuckles, and she brushes her fingers through his hair.

His brown eyes glow in the dark. She knows hers glow in the same way.

_My stars on your chest,_ Jyn thinks. _Your moons on my back._

The Shimmer in their eyes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for further reading on ANNIHILATION, check out [this tumblr post](http://theputterer.tumblr.com/post/172070179941/further-reading-on-annihilation). it links to some of my favorite essays on the film, including the previously mentioned one by Film Crit Hulk, but also these: 
> 
> -Walter Chow at Film Freak Central [on repetition, suicide, recovery, Virginia Woolf's THE WAVES, Tarkovsky's STALKER; "This is what I said."]  
> -Priscilla Page at Birth.Movies.Death [on Carl Jung, William Friedkin, Virginia Woolf's TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, the meaning of the Shimmer and why you walk into it, the tattoos, refractions; "I wonder if I'll be trapped in you."]  
> -Angelica Jade Bastién at Vulture [on mental illness and how it warps reality, annihilation as revelation, the lighthouse as desire, the face of depression, and moving on; "Let's talk about what it means to destroy yourself."]
> 
> I truly loved ANNIHILATION. it was achingly familiar while feeling astonishingly original. I recognized the existential horror of mental illness, with the raw urge to turn it against myself, and back and forth. it was original in that I had not seen a movie take it on like that before.
> 
> I loved all the talk of science and biology, coupled next to how they get thrown out the window in the face of inexplicable, yet undeniable, evidence that does exist. mental illness is not a one-size-fits all beast, and it is not a thing easily visible for most.
> 
> Most: I loved the idea of self-destruction as a catalyst, and the idea that the event it catalyzes may not be true, annihilating destruction. 
> 
> I did write about mental illness in the Nonsense, and I'm constantly interested and enthusiastic about opening up more of STAR WARS to dialogues and characters living openly and fearlessly with mental illness. so to see ANNIHILATION, and those themes I tried to outline in this story, and have a tidbit of an idea to create a STAR WARS AU: it was very fun, and very meaningful. i hope you liked it.
> 
> as always, please do share your thoughts, here or on [tumblr](http://theputterer.tumblr.com/)


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